The Sheep and the Lion: How much is public education worth?

There is a term called “going down the rabbit hole” that is used to understand abstract and deep concepts. Depending on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go can determine your resolve for understanding a problem. This article is a “big picture” view of going down a rabbit hole more than some people are willing to go in regard to public education and the value it has for society.

The following radio broadcast from Doc Thompson is very good, and comfortably sits on the edge of that rabbit hole, where even this much people are unwilling to go. But I offer it as an alternative to the text that follows. Or I offer it to help the rest of the text go down more easily. But beware, if you want to maintain any illusions about education, then turn away from this page immediately. I talk about some of my personal experiences again, partly because there has been much speculation. But the opinions will not be comfortable for the reader wanting to continue “not seeing.”

The first thing that teachers assume of school reformers is that they must not have done very well in school, or that they had a hard time in college, or that they are simply social outcasts that have some vendetta against public education. What they fail to consider, because such a thought is outside of their “bubble” of experience is that there is a portion of society that think for themselves and have seen the scam for what it is, deciding to not take part in the whole process.

In my case, I decided long ago that the system didn’t work. It never worked for me because I’ve never been happy in a follower position. I’ve always questioned authority, my entire life. In fact, in kindergarten, I missed several of my recesses for arguing with the teachers. It became apparent to me early on that education wasn’t so much about learning arithmetic, language, and art, as it was about learning how to take direction.

I have had great success in life by being a leader. To date, the only thing I’ve received from family, friends or “others” is a workbench vice I inherited from my grandfather when he died. Money, or money gained from property sales passed down through my family have never found their way to me, and on purpose. I resist any relationships where I take a passive role and where a gift can be used as leverage against me down the road.

Now to many people who may seem extreme. However, if you want freedom, you must have freedom of such predatory relationships. And, unfortunately teachers, by design, form a predatory relationship with their students the way the system is currently set up.

When I was younger, I will admit that there was a blood bath that followed in my wake. I spent a lot of time in court, in fights with other students, and in general trouble with officials in school. Much of that trouble came simply because I refused to submit to an authority figure. That’s it. I never looked for trouble. I just didn’t like authority figures and since socially, submission of some kind to authority is required, I was in for a constant barrage of trouble which found me.

It has never occurred to me that I was in the wrong for taking this position. It doesn’t take a brilliant mind to sit in one of the many parties that I attended and see the failure of public education. Many of the kids back then when speaking of Pink Floyd would proclaim, “Man, you have to be wasted to understand The Wall.” At those parties stoned classmates would watch MTV with awe as “We Don’t Need No Education” played displaying a bunch of kids being processed in a factory, faceless and being cast into a meat grinder. Such a metaphor was very similar to my own thoughts, but I never did drugs and I certainly wasn’t wasted. I went to parties back then to pick up girls that were, but I did not partake in that behavior.

If you want to understand a culture, study its music, and you will learn a lot.

You would think that many parents would have wanted their kids to spend their time with me. After all, I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t use curse words, I helped people when I could, I was polite and well spoken. But I was also defiant, inquisitive, and perpetually skeptical. In fact there were two rules that people riding in my car had to live with when I was 16. (And note that I did not have a shortage of people wanting to spend time with me. It was the parents that didn’t want their kids around me.) First, there was no smoking allowed. Second, we would not play Pink Floyd on my car stereo, because I understood the stuff all too well and thought it was depressing to meditate on such things, where many of the youth back then did. One of my best friends back then was told by his mother and father to stay away from Rich Hoffman. He’s not the kind of kid I want you to be friends with.

His mother’s preferences were the drug induced kids from the neighborhood, whose parents she knew. My friend became addicted to drugs and was lost eventually, but not because he was friends with me. If he had been friends with me, he wouldn’t have done drugs, or stolen from people. He wouldn’t have contracted a variety of STD’s and probably would have entered adulthood with his head on straight.

My head has always been on straight, even when authority figures wanted me to believe otherwise.

The next question that arrives is that why would authority figures wish to convince a person that they are in need of care. The answer to that is easy. Authority figures are perpetually in need of justifying their existence. Since their lives and careers are embedded in the lives of others, they are terribly insecure of people who don’t need them.

College wasn’t any different. When I was there, young people were more interested in the social aspects of college life than the scholastic and the whole thing seemed like a money pit to me. Professors were seeking to drag out studies that could be done in weeks into events that went on for months so they could charge $10 per credit hour or more. The charge alone for books was an obvious scam. That’s how it appeared to me, and I still feel that way.

I’ve lived a life full of education, but also free of authority figures. And I’ve had success in life when I became old enough to be sought after as a leader, because that is my natural impulse. I don’t wake up in the morning looking for power or influence. But when I’m in a collaborative effort with others, I am only comfortable in a leadership role. That’s my nature and I understand it.

So I understand the frustration people who have committed, and submitted their lives to such things as to my motives and their speculation of my back ground. The idea of cutting all ties into their lives that are corrosive and manipulative is a completely foreign concept to them and something they cannot fathom.

Even knowing that the public education system was seriously flawed, I sent my kids anyway. My wife always liked school, until she met me, and she felt our children should have school in their lives. I argued that the kids could learn faster if they took a more independent route, but I listened to her opinion on the matter. The result, my kids breezed through school. I taught them not to take the whole thing too serious and not to submit to any authority and they navigated through the experience very well without all the pitfalls that most kids go through regarding peer pressure and social-climbing.

The reason for this explanation is that there is a story in mythology that I learned a long time ago that I think about a lot. It goes something like this; a lion was separated from his parents and was discovered by a herd of sheep. The sheep took the lion in and raised it for many years.

The lion grew to full size and was roaming around in the herd with the other sheep where a pack of lions hunting the sheep saw the lion and called him over whispering. “Hey, what are you doing? You’re roaming around with the sheep.”

All the Sheep trained Lion could say was, “Baaaaahaaahaaa.” Because his instruction came from the sheep all his life, he didn’t know any better.

The lions took the Sheep/Lion to the river and said, “Look at your reflection. You’re one of us. You’re not a sheep. You’re supposed to eat those creatures.”

The story goes on where the Sheep/Lion rediscovers his true identity and becomes in the end what he was meant to be.

Human beings are no different. We all are lions in sheep’s clothing. It’s a cultural phenomenon indicative of authoritarian culture created when humans moved from a nomad society to an agricultural society. Europe and all its problems are derived from attempting to maintain human beings in an agricultural society, including their attempt at education.

Those that settled the United States left that behavior behind in Europe in favor of a Lion’s life in the New World and it was so important to them that they’d risk their life to have it.

My oldest daughter and I had a long talk under the stars till about 3 AM one night a few years ago and she asked me what she was supposed to do with all the stuff I taught her. After all, it’s a fine line between enlightenment and insanity. The slopes to insanity are steep if you are not within the safety of the herd. It’s not that she questioned the truth of it, but co-existence with others becomes difficult when you insist on living awake when the people around you insist on being asleep.

I told her that most of the people who think in such a way as I do, end up going insane by their early 40’s, or they become abusers of drugs in order to maintain that reality to themselves against the current of sheep, that secretly wish the safety of the herd, so they turn to chemical abuse to numb them.

“How do you keep from going crazy?”

I smiled at her, “You have to start with being grounded to begin with. You read a lot and study other Lion’s that have lived full lives and witness how they did it. You don’t abuse alcohol or drugs or sub come to other human weaknesses. But you have to not compare yourself to the sheep around you, because relative to them, you will seem crazy. The life of a sheep and the life of a lion are completely different. The sheep grazes in the field, and travels in a pack. They mate and give birth occasionally. They run away when a predator comes near and if they live to old age, they die eventually as their bodies break away. The Loin travels in a pack when they find hunting that way more convenient, but they stay solitary animals most of the time. Like most cats, they are happiest when they are alone.”

That took the conversation into a different direction, the difference between dogs and cats.

I personally like dogs. They are always happy to see you. They are intensely loyal, even when you abuse them. Cats, they only come around when they want a lap to lay in. If they get mad at you, they’ll avoid you. They never seem to sink deep roots in their owner. They seem to choose their loyalty carefully and that loyalty leaves quickly if the relationship is strained. Those types of differences can be found in people too. Society expects dogs and the loyalty of them. But some people are just cats. We might sub consciously call those types a “cool cat.” I would make the psychological argument that what the nation is experiencing with Charlie Sheen right now is that very complex. It’s no secret that public characters like Snoop Dog, Charlie Sheen and Dennis Rodman are dear to the deep recesses of the human condition. Socially those characters are rejected, but when the doors are closed and the arms of a woman are wrapped around them, the truth is revealed.

To my observation of public education is that it fails at a fundamental level. It teaches our youth to be sheep and not lions. My view is taken in the context of philosophy, and I understand that many people in our society aren’t ready for that line of thought. They want to be sheep, and they want their kids to be sheep.

So the argument then becomes one of business. Can we afford the current form of public education? No. The way the unions have structured their contracts have turned the whole funding of education into a Ponzi scheme much like Social Security. The step increases that were negotiated require higher and higher taxes to maintain the funding, and we’ve hit the wall.

One of the benefits of being a leader type is that I don’t have the burden of appeasing any group. So I can look objectively at the situation and name the problems for what they are, because I’m not looking at any part of the problem with emotion. I already think the system is broken; I am not looking for ways to justify the behavior. And I have no illusion that by throwing more money at the situation that it will solve anything. All it does is push the wall a bit to delay the crash that’s happening. It’s hard for many people to see the wall because they don’t want to believe it’s there, because public education has become for them much more than basic education services. Sports provide the possibility of college scholarships, and school social events provide opportunities for young people to “interact” and discover themselves.

Teachers that truly believe they are the saviors of society are particularly arrogant in their thinking on this issue. But much of their work can be replaced with a computer in this new century, where the computer is ironically much more personable. I don’t say that out of a dislike of teachers, which I’ve admitted that I personally don’t like authority figures, but the idea of a solitary figure speaking to a class where the weakest link of the class sets the pace is archaic.

In truth, my dislike of public education was based on that one principle. I couldn’t stand the pace of the learning. I’m a person that enjoys doing things at a fast pace. And the classroom was always just too slow for me. Now I may be the exception, but it is apparent that it doesn’t work very well for other students either. The difference is other students were content to learn how to “game” the system, get their passing grades and move on to the next grade. Most of the time they forgot what they learned by the next semester because their goal was not to learn the material, it was to get a passing grade and advance to the next level.

When you learn to be a lion, a leader in the world, you will find that your services are always in high demand, because such people are rare when they are in great need. So career worries go away, where the sheep of the world are always concerned if the farmer will feed them, or if a predator will attempt to hunt them down and kill them, the lion doesn’t concern themselves with such matters. And thinking like a lion does not mean that I automatically support a sports team like the Cincinnati Bengals.

My favorite football team is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers so when my wife and I want to go to a football game, we fly down to Tampa to watch them play. It is more practical to me to fly 1000 miles to see a good team than to drive 20 miles to see a bad one. If I’m going to pay for the NFL experience, I’m going to enjoy it, and not just do what’s convenient. A few years ago, when we were waiting for a night game to start, we were killing some time at The International Mall, which is within walking distance to Raymond James Stadium, one of my favorite places in the world. We spent half an afternoon needlessly shopping and still had some time to kill before the gates opened, so we stopped by a very elaborate booth for Rosetta Stone Software located in the middle of the mall.

The attendant at the booth gave me a head set and computer and let my wife and I play with the foreign language software for several hours. When I finished, and we headed over to the game, I realized that the way we are currently learning foreign language and just about everything in public education is outdated. That Rosetta Stone Software had made learning much more practical and interactive, and that the only reason public school did not leap into this style of learning was because the teacher unions would stand in the way of that innovation.

They’d stand in the way because public education had become more about creating jobs than actually learning. The current focus was maintaining the system along the same fashion that education had been embarking on since schools were a one room building. The only thing that’s changed is the school became larger, but the teacher at the front of the room is the same, and it is no longer as necessary.

One of the arguments for this big system is that poor students don’t have access to computers and they need a teacher to help them, because they don’t have a family to take care of them at home. This is the way the unions sell their service now and why they insist on the current costly form of education. It has more to do with social structure and social ills, than actual educational performance, which shows in the students.

It’s easy for me to see all this because I wasn’t happy with the system to begin with. But I’m happy to pay my taxes and participate if the rest of the members of my community want it. And we do pay a lot in property taxes. But when I hear schools lie to people, and I see teacher unions manipulating the situation and attacking people for questioning their motives, then it changes the argument.

To participate in a system blindly costs money, not to mention social consequences. My view of those social consequences might be extreme to many, even though privately most people agree with me once they close their eyes at night and can read their thoughts across the backs of their eye lids. But the financial burden of the public education system needs to be broken down and restructured, and unions stand in the way of that, so that is the reason for the adversarial relationship. The more hate mail and comments I receive, the more convinced I am of the lack of merit in public education.

The intent behind the name calling, and the attempt to silence any critics are to continue to ask for more money to keep a broken system functioning. As I’ve established, I am an employer, and I’ve heard every possible justification and excuse from employees over the years that wish to convince me that they are special, and that they and only they can do a particular job. After several hundred of those statements you learn to see what truth is and what fiction is. As an employer you must have an understanding of the job you are asking people to do, otherwise you are guilty of not being able to make a proper assessment, and are 100% reliant on your employees to tell you how valuable they are. And they will try, and if you don’t know, they will take advantage of you 99% of the time.

With public education, I’ve been there and done that. I learned a lot more when I finally got out of public education because the barriers to learning were removed, and I was able to attack it at the fast pace I enjoy. I have had to provide instruction to people myself, and teach, lead and assess talent, so I understand what works and what doesn’t. And I’ve had success outside the classroom. Many of the professors and teachers that I’ve known over the years fit the description, “those that can’t do, teach,” meaning that people who can do are in the world working and producing, those who aren’t comfortable with producing stay in the safe world of academia, and they teach, or they attempt to be professional students. I have known more than a few of those types and have actually given a few of them jobs much to my frustration, because they are so timid. They tend to be the type of person that will stand at the side of a pool and stick their foot in to see how cold the water is. I’m the type that will jump in regardless of the temperature so they frustrate me to no end. But it takes all kinds of people to make the world go around, so I put up with them. The question is not whether or not those people have worth. They do somewhere. The question is are they worth six figures? No!

Public education if we look at it for what it is it’s for many people an opportunity for their kid to get a scholarship for higher education. For others it’s a day care facility, because parents are busy with their lives and don’t have anywhere to put their kids while they are at work. Let’s face it and call the situation what it is.

My goal is to see kids actually learn something. I think the whole idea needs to be turned upside down and rebuilt, because as I look around, the people functioning in the world around me are failing. The divorce rate is too high. The moral standards are too low. People’s understanding of politics is abysmal. Their understanding of geography is pathetic, some people actually don’t even know where India is! Their confidence in themselves is terrible and they pass that along to their children, which raises more insecure children. All these are social failures which to me start with a failure of public education, and more money does not solve it. We’ve poured a lot of money into the situation, and it has not worked.

It is easy to attempt to maintain the status quo by proclaiming that its critics “don’t like” education, or some other loose term. It would be expected for sheep to make vicious proclamations of the lion, because deep down inside, the sheep wish they had the courage to be lions, but they don’t. All that’s left is to hurl insults in an attempt to cover the fat life of the herd animal that just seeks more and more feed to provide nourishment to its virulent existence within the confines of the barn yard. My concern is the larger issue of actual performance as a primary concern, and secondly, of the financial stability, which is proven to be not well thought out.

The old games are no longer effective because the sheep in the barn yard have noisily protested for years and now we see that they are all fat and need to be sheered. And it is my hope that once we start doing the sheering that we will find beneath all the hair that some of those sheep are actually lions, and can return to their natural state and teach others to be lions and return the nation to what it started as, and avoid a fate of a depleted, crushed Europe full of glory from some ancient time while the future leaves it behind.

Unfortunately only leader types are able to see that far ahead. The sheep are only looking at their next meal, but the big cats, the lions lay perched in trees and look out over the savanna to what is far off and they will be the first to see what is invisible to everyone else.

Education needs reformed for more reasons than one and we will have it, because it’s what’s good for America, not just those that have built lives off it.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Meet Ayn Rand: My Kind of Woman

Here is one of my favorite writers. For those that think the current push against the intellectual controlled advancement toward of collective society based on Sir Thomas More’s book from the 1500’s is a recent development, here are some old interviews of Ayn Rand.

I enjoy her work even though she wrote in the 1950’s. It is quite refreshing to hear her speak thanks to this old footage, another one of the great miracles of the internet, and another reason Net Neutrality would enjoy regulating the content that we can find on the internet using the FCC.

Here you can see a person from the 50’s talking about the collectivism push from “intellectuals” prior to the pathetic riots on the campus of Berkeley on December 2nd 1964. It is extremely unfortunate that liberal professors stand at the gates of higher education, and that the push for moving society in that direction is a form of programming for entire generations.

Saying such things as Ayn says here or someone like me 60 years later may sound conspiratorial, or even paranoid. Yet the evidence of what Ayn speaks about then is all around us now. Look carefully and the evidence is abundant.

Are we lambs or the wolf? If you identify with being a flock of sheep waiting to be led, you can be led to a slaughterhouse. If you are the wolf, you hunt the sheep and even the shepherd.

Social programs are designed to make people identify themselves into sheep.

Where Rand proclaims herself as an atheist I think that is too general of a term. She puts her faith in reason. I would say that currently the idea of god exists within the 11 known dimensions of our existence, so it is foolish to proclaim that there isn’t a god. But her message of self-reliance is a key to personal happiness and social responsibility.

I like this following clip because the guy makes some nice arguments. However, I would say that he became sensitive to social issues while in college, like has happened to many college attendees instructed by liberal professors which over time has had a devastating effect on our populations ability to vote intelligently.

The institutions of control and social sensitivity use Colbert and the Daily Show to appeal to younger audiences so to diffuse free market tendencies like the increase sales of Rand’s books in response to the Obama presidency.

Maybe the guy makes a nice sentimental point. After all, it is easier to be accepted in a group environment as one would be in a flock of sheep. There is safety in numbers, and many would be willing to trade away their freedoms for a chance of such a safety net.

But I am something of a wolf, and I don’t have any desire to hunt in a pack. The concept of such flock like behavior is disgusting in the confines it places on personal liberty.

And I would say that Ayn Rand was a fellow wolf.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Speed! Update on the Tail of the Dragon

I saw a video today of a Corvette accelerating to 195 mph, supposedly. It’s a 1000 HP modified car that the guy is trying to sell by showing off its speed. I understand that he was given citations for his speed which will have to be contested in court because he was not actually pulled over by an officer.

This reminded me of a book that I’m working on. I’m talking to a couple of different publishers right now, so it’s on my mind. The book is the Tail of the Dragon, and it features a car that is a 700 HP car that runs off a diesel conversation to vegetable oil. Anyway, watching that Corvette reminded me of what the acceleration would look like in my car chase book.

Here’s a reading from me of the first couple of pages.

This morning I had to revise part of the package of questions one particular publisher sent me for some market analysis of my novel to figure out if it fits into their 2nd quarter lineup. It’s a long time consuming process, but I thought for the sake of fun that I’d put up the contents of my correspondence today in tribute to that speedy video.

Dear Gail,

It occurred to me after I sent back the questionnaire for publication of my Tail of the Dragon novel, that the answer to item 24, what is the most compelling aspect of your novel, was not fully explained until I thought about it over the last few weeks.

The answer I provided was decent enough, don’t get me wrong. I would like to add to what I provided.

The most compelling aspect of the novel is something equally grand, but philosophically less obvious. Its felt more than explained, which explains the lack of articulation on my part. Tail of the Dragon involves our heroes going on a destructive romance through the entire state of Tennessee and North Carolina that results in the deaths of many police and National Guardsman. Not on purpose or maliciousness, but as a by-product of the experience. It also results in hundreds of millions of dollars of property damage and captures for a time the entire nation. Such events traditionally end in the death of the characters, such as in Bonnie and Clyde, but not in Tail of the Dragon.

In my novel the heroes live happily ever after. In fact the lead character gets a contract to begin racing in NASCAR because of his sudden fame and marketability. What happens is the same public relation firms that are criticized heavily in the Tail of the Dragon are employed at the end to re-shape public opinion, and within days of the destructive incidence, the same people that suffered at the hands of the heroes, are now in line to get their autographs, and that is the true parody to the story, and is the most compelling aspect to the Tail of the Dragon.

I hope that you will send this forth to be included with the other information I provided in regard to publication of my Tail of the Dragon. And I hope that you and your family have a delightful Christmas and fantastic New Year.

Rich Hoffman

http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Hidden World of the Overman

This article is full of issues best described through fiction, although much of it is either rooted in history, or is in fact theory based on sound observations. Some of those observations may be difficult to accept. But that’s not my problem. My job is to write it down so you, (the reader), can visualize. Understanding is up to you.

……………………………………………………..

A sturdy bridge expands the mote to the front door, which is imposing. The castle is not huge by normal standards. Such places may be thought of as mansions, but not this place. It was larger than a normal house, but certainly not too large for a small family. Leopold noted the corrugated metal roof disguised cleverly with the spires topping off rotundas at each corner of the castle. The whole thing looked like the dream of a typical 7 year old boy. It wouldn’t be surprising to find the mote filled with alligators, or sea monsters, if the reputation of Fletcher Finnegan could serve as testimony.

As he and the General walked the wide, rail less bridge, their feet thudded against the wood with each step. It took longer than they wanted to cross the bridge where an oppressive door awaited them. It was medieval looking by design but made of steal.

“This is the epitome of paranoia,” Leopold gasped as he searched for a door bell of some kind. “Surely there must be some kind of ringing device. He can’t expect visitors to knock on the door?”

The General just shrugged off the comment and gave the door a violent bang with his fist. “We’re not here for tea. This is a criminal and justice must be served.”

The General’s knocks rang off. They could tell by the sound that the room was cavernous on the other side, and knew that whoever was inside would clearly be able to hear. Within a few moments, there was the sound of something unlatching, and the big door opened inward. In the doorway stood the mythical Fletcher Finnegan, with a fresh white shirt, looking like a character from a never written book called Warrior’s from Pirate Island. His gaze was firm, and manner easy even to the point of relaxed. He wore casual jeans, and some well polished black shoes. Two bullwhips hung from his hips from unusual holsters attached to his belt. The handles pointing out looking like samurai swords ready to leap into action. His hair was extremely short, and his face was determined and attractive. His green eyes, deep and penetrating, could burn a hole through anybody with the gaze he laid on them.

“Welcome,” said Fletcher in the charismatic manner he had become known for. His motions mimicking great linguists with audacious hand movements not out of respect, but seemingly of disdain. “I have been expecting some sort of response such as this.”

Leopold traded uneasy glances at the General who tried to bury his concern, but was having a hard time of it. That concern was well founded. Here stood a man that had single handedly defeated a number of Special Forces experts, and legions of law enforcement over the last year. He had announced his terrorist intentions back then by portraying a masked night bandit practicing vigilante behavior outside of the law. He had killed Mayor Goodman from this town of Fort Seven Mile and had maimed and killed others as well since that time.

Leopold was maybe for the first time in his life of 44 years, speechless. But with a few deep breaths, words came to his mouth. “We have come to discuss the peril you bring mankind. “

Finnegan’s response, “You have brought a crooked tongue in an attempt to skew deceptions into a manageable forum.”
“How could you know my tongue is crooked if you do not know me,” Leopold found himself saying.

“Because men such as yourself let your tongue direct your feet, and as I watched you cross my bridge, you walked crooked.”

“There you would be wrong. I am quite educated, beyond taking direction from feet, or other bodily limbs. My peers at Princeton have had more to do with where my feet take me than the feet themselves.” Leopold was proud of himself for establishing his intellectual superiority. He had done his homework on Fletcher Finnegan. Finnegan had dropped out of college several times over the years, and before winning the lottery a few years back, had worked many odd jobs just to make a living for his family. He had married young, and had two children just shy of adolescence. Leopold placed his bets that somewhere within Finnegan’s exterior of security hid a dark, nasty secret of some social insecurity. It was quite obvious that he struggled in school and that was the reason for his college issues. This was why Finnegan was reputed for using such large vocabulary and projected himself as superior to all other men so as to protect his fragile ego and the reality that he couldn’t compete in an academic environment.

But Fletcher smiled. “I can see this will be entertaining if nothing else. And who have you brought with you?”

The General stepped forward his girth outreaching his hand if he had offered it for a hand shake. “You can just call me, General. No other name need apply to you. I have a legion of troops at my disposal at the edge of this town awaiting the outcome of this visit. If peace can not be found here, I will instruct them to take this residence with all the force needed. If you’ll do what’s right, you will spare the needless destruction to the homes of your neighbors by surrendering now and coming with me immediately!”

Fletcher gave the General a deep look. “I have a new name for you. I will call you Fat Man. It is much more appropriate than what you said. For your mind seems to reflect your appearance, and that is not sharp, let me assure you. Your ideas about the role you play in my life are as wide as your waistband when the reality is truly just a lot of undigested waste. Bring your legions and they will fall as those that came before you fell. Mind yourself while in my residence. I’ll warn you only once.”
The General was not used to this kind of talk directed toward him. “I have been given a division of troops to deal exclusively with you. The pentagon is now involved in your escapades and that does not bid well for you.”

“You seem very impressed with the power you command.” Fletcher moves a bit closer to the Major General. “But my strategy is set knowing that you command them.”

The Major General is aghast. “You are in no position for insults!”

“I do not take threats from a man claiming to command legions of troops when he can’t even govern himself.” Fletcher smiled and pointed to the inflated girth of the General around his waste. “It would seem all you can manage is putting food in your mouth.”

The General had enough. He stood and pulled a gun to fire.

The Major had been briefed on Cliffhanger, which was the name the media had
given Fletcher Finnegan in the early days of his vigilante behavior. He knew of his incredible speed. He knew he had single handedly beat a professional hit man and several of his personal assistance. But the understanding of that speed could not be fathomed until this moment.

Fletcher rolled out of his seat as the bullet screamed from the brandishing Colt 45 and buried itself into the chair. In an instant, Fletcher had a whip in his hand and slashed the gun from the General before an eye could blink. The gun flew uneventfully across the dining room into the corner. Fletcher, determination dominating his face stood satisfied that the General was now plagued with so much self doubt, that he’s no longer a serious threat.

“It would also seem that your fingers have inherited much from your waist. They are too slow to consider pulling a trigger against me.” Fletcher throws the whip over his shoulder and returns to his seat, first examining the hole that’s now in it. The shot would have been a good one right through the heart if Fletcher had not moved.

Leopold Smith searches Fletcher’s face for some psychological hint of doubt. “You’re quite impressed with yourself. You must of course realize that this desire you have for perfection must derive from insecurities.” Leopold licks his lips in nervousness. “I’d expect at the very least professional courtesy with this visit.”

Fletcher smiles, “Professional courtesy, interesting choice of words. The term “professional behavior” denotes evasive politeness to disguise the aggressive nature of business. It is an unethical practice that opens too many possibilities for misunderstanding, which is the intent. The cowards that practice this behavior always leave open a back door for them to retreat within when times get tough. The blame always falls to the hand of misunderstanding.”

The General still has not closed his mouth. He had never seen in his life such unwavering confidence and speed. He took a few steps in the direction of the nearest chair and plopped himself into it. Only now did he take the time to look about the large opening room to this castle home of this unusual warrior and admiration couldn’t help but come to him.

Leopold could see what was going on with the General. After all, the General was a military man and force was something he understood. Most often, intelligence gathering required hundreds of resources just to acquire scant bits of data, and that data was acted on with the threat of superior firepower. Here was a family man, with a home. Not an average home, but the man was far from average. He oozed paradoxes with every movement, and words that sprung from his lips like an Olympic fencer. He was a man of paradoxes not because what he said was untrue, or he emitted qualities of a contradictory nature, but that he himself was challenging the course of mankind and everything that it seemed to mean to our entire species. And he did it with the self-confidence of champion athlete.

Fletcher was studying Leopold and could surely read his thoughts by the way those eyes dissected him. Leopold had never had that experience from a patient.

“Why don’t you tell me who sent you and why,” Fletcher finally let out.

“There’s no secret there, Mr. Finnegan. You know surely by now that you are the world’s enemy. That if you did not live here in this community, so close to town, that you would be utterly destroyed with a nuclear weapon, which may still be an option. Nobody wants civilians killed, and nobody wants to evacuate an entire town just to destroy you. I honestly don’t think you want that either, after all, you came to all this trouble protecting people, so I’d venture to gamble that you don’t want civilian casualties either. Am I wrong?”

Fletcher smiled a bit before answering, “Of course not.”

“Well, at least we can agree on something. That’s a start.” Leopold studied Fletcher’s reaction to that. It was important to pull the patient into an agreeable setting right from the start if possible. It gave them something to build upon. “I was asked to see you by the highest levels of the Pentagon at direct request by the President. He is under tremendous pressure from the world’s governments to act quickly on this. Your terrorist exploits have caught the attention of the very powerful as I’m sure you’re aware.”

“I am aware that the world has taken a disproportionate notice on my activities, which to me provides credibility to my original claims and reveals my true enemies through their actions. I don’t blame you for not understanding the complexity of this quagmire. You are as much a part of it as I am.” Fletcher looked almost sympathetic to Leopold at that moment.

“This meeting is an attempt to urge your surrender in the hope that more bloodshed will not be necessary.” Leopold paused for dramatic reasons hoping he had earned Fletcher’s trust. “Your revolution has been noted. Your beliefs have found a foundation. My job here is to listen to you. To provide that platform you seem to desire. To provide an outlet that does not result in more killing.”

“Or the General will unleash his troops.” Fletcher looked over to see if the General was paying attention, and he was.

“That is correct, Mr. Finnegan. If Mr. Smith fails to reach you today, and force your surrender with reason, then I will call all the military might I command to end your rebellion before the sun drops over the horizon.”

Fletcher looked unfazed and unreachable by these threats. “So, I see you have not met your true, bosses?”

Leopold smiled a bit at that. “I had heard that you had some interesting theories. And let me say before you start that you seem to be highly intelligent, and to consider what you tell me carefully. Theories of conspiracy, especially by extra-terrestrials, and other outlandish organizations are clear signs of severe psychological disorders. I already suspect as I reviewed your case file, that you have suffered numerous mental deficiencies such as dementia, senile dementia to be more specific. You are known to spend tremendous amounts of time alone, and this would make you prone to this disorder even at your relatively young age.”

Fletcher leaned forward a bit still smiling. “I can see we have a long way to go here. I will play this game, not because I hope for a peaceful end, but because there are many questions and answers I would like to answer and propose. But do not think you are here for the President, or for the UN. The real masters use these titles for their personal folly. They have since the beginning of mankind. You are merely smoke from the mirrors of their reality.”

Leopold loved what he was hearing. With great excitement he wrote down what Fletcher just said. “Classic, because it fills your fantasy of dementia.” Leopold was enthusiastic. “Why don’t you start from the beginning? Tell me the root of your conspiracy. Who sent me to you?

Fletcher paused and looked contemplative. “If you wish, but I warn you. You will not leave my home today with the same outlook at life that you entered it with.”

“In between the realities of our four dimensional space we will, most likely beyond those limits exist a race of living intelligence. This living intelligence is as real as any nation we speak of, and their motives are no different from any of mankind’s. Therefore, caution must always be applied when dealing with them, for without knowledge of their existence and needs, motives cannot be determined. The so called Mothmen are a breed of cavalry that zip in and out of our dimensional reality as scouts for their war which is waged upon our entire race. The goal of this war is to keep us in a depleted state and unaware of their mechanisms and lust for control. Ultra-terrestrials will stop at nothing to prevent man from achieving the realm of the Overman.” Fletcher studied Leopold and the General to measure their reaction.

Leopold was trying not to laugh, but was not able to contain his contemptuous smile. “So you believe we are at war with a species of beings that we can’t see. You call them, Ultra-terrestrials.”

Fletcher was aware of the condemnation but paid it no attention. He wasn’t going to convince this agent of normality to alter his entire world view with just a few sentences. “Mind tricks are their key strategy and false truths that lead to fruitless pursuits of a time-consuming nature dominate their tactics. Their influence can be traced back through our entire human history and have often been poorly categorized as demons, devils, angels and other religious symbols. It is through religious symbols that they conduct their illusions using as a stage those beliefs which masquerade the show’s directors and producers. For all across this planet, intertwined with all our established systems and institutions, religion holds many minds fixed in a state of depraved knowledge where the would be questioning mind restrains from pushing against those barriers for fear of death. Fears put in place from the beginning of time, through mythology by ultra-terrestrials. This is why being fearless is the paramount ingredient of the Overman, for on the fearless tract of adventure, no map has been graphed. It is in these uncharted waters that fear begins to work in the overman’s favor because the ultra-terrestrials begin to feel it themselves.”

“An Overman, you state the term Nietzsche uses in his book, Thus Spoke Zarathrustra.”

“You are showing a bit of literary prowess, very good.”

Leopold felt himself fluster a bit at earning some respectful praise from Fletcher Finnegan. “I was briefed that you used the term to justify your position. What is an Overman exactly, as you see it?”

Fletcher looked contemplative. “You ask me what an Overman is. I say to you that it is embracing the concept of being more than just human. It is in accepting your fate that life is meant to be lived now as well as later. At all times, as an individual, you are in control of your vessel as you navigate through a jagged life. And at times, when you meet with another independent soul, that you may come into conflict with them by the will of nature and that this conflict is needed and healthy. When you come to these times of war, you should fight with all your vigor and enjoy the spilling of blood, especially if it is your opponents. You should enjoy it because if their goal was to stop your ability to exercise free will then you have used your free will to destroy the devices that could hinder you.”

Leopold already had the words in his mouth. “Hitler believed similar things as you do. He too was a lover of Nietzsche and professed the need for a higher form of mankind.”

“Hitler was a fascist. That is different from what I propose. His feeble mind only grasped the power of the Overman. His vision of a superior race of man was driven from his involvement with the Vril society and other occult practices that have their roots in our hidden history. It’s in our lack of acceptance of this hidden history that we fail to understand the evil of Adolf Hitler and to this day cannot mutter a word of his decadence. His psychosis was driven from a mixed fascination with power and history. The Overman idea was native to Germany and was an easy rally for the nation to justify their derangement.”

“True enough, but what gives you the right to judge all of civilization? That is as haughty as Hitler’s position.” Leopold knew he had Fletcher on that one. Here was a man that championed himself a savior and Leopold was comparing him to the vast evil of Hitler.

But Fletcher was un-phased, like he had been waiting on Leopold to say just such a thing. “‘Judge not least thee be judged.’ What banter from roaches that crave the darkness to hide their malicious ways! What does this statement promise but peace? ‘Don’t judge me, and I won’t judge you.’ To me this is a declaration of war, because, it implies a consequence for the act of judging.”

Leopold is astonished. “With your heretical muttering you mock the words of Jesus Christ! Do you consider yourself an atheist, because such comments will surely plant you in Hell!

“An atheists, I am certainly not. To assume I am some sort of agnostic, nonbeliever shows the magnitude of your limited thinking. To say that “God” is all there is and all there will ever be is to say that the Earth is just all there was or is. And the holder of all life on this planet is our supreme king and has domination over our entire existence with and without flesh. No. Your definitions are infantile. You assume all that is known now is all that will be known. I have seen evidence that we as a race have forgotten more than we have progressed. And at the heart of that lost knowledge is your need to look to a leader, or a god to take responsibility for your meager lives. Once this king is in power, power that you give him, his fetus like ego clings to that power like the infant clings to its mother’s breast for milk. The infant believes, and I think we can agree on this, that the mother’s breast exists only for its feeding.”

“So you propose that your outlook on life exceeds the importance of even religion? That is an insane proposition. Absolutely insane,” Leopold contends while adjusting his comb over with one of his hands.

Fletcher lets out a laugh. He is confident and completely un-rattled by Leopold’s orthodox grip on reality. “It takes just a small spark where everyone thought it was impossible, and once that myth is dispelled, the flood gates open, and the impulse to create springs forth. The Overman always stays ahead of those fools that clamor after his heels with desperation. Their drive is not from their own domains, but are copy cats of divine design. Humor flows from the coat tails of the mimics as they pursue the Overman’s shadows. But in this wake to those of common thinking, the appearance of authority is a terror. Terrible in that to the meager mind, the mere ripples of something greater than simple men sets those complacent minds into fearful recollections bridging into childhood fortifications.”

“You speak out of your authority. I am the psychologist here and I will determine what the origins of childhood fortifications are.”

Fletcher is ruthless. “We will cover your need for titles later. You asked me to reveal to you the contents of invisible empires and the thoughts of an Overman. I will not be limited in this discussion by your boundaries. You can either keep up with me, but you will not hinder me. Is this clear?

Leopold found himself nodding yes before he could consider a proper reaction to the question.

Fletcher continues before Leopold can open his mouth. “This is why men do not see much of what exists. The name of what they don’t understand is reflective of the minds that construct them. They call God, God. No explicit name, but an all encompassing title to attempt to wrap these mysteries in a meaning applicable to human lifetimes. They call UFO’s by the broad title of, unidentified flying object, because they can’t identify things beyond their comprehension.

“By setting high standards judging is part of the process of determining the value of one set of standards against another. How can this be determined if judging is not utilized? So to endorse a non-judgmental stance at life, one basically proclaims to accept low standards because only there can all be equal in one nice bowl of soup to be consumed by those that feed off life. That is what you do when you eat, you feed yourself to live. So always there is something out there looking to feed off you. If you are not the best, the strongest, the fastest, smartest or anything that has put you ahead of the pack you make yourself an easy target for those that are hungry.

“The peace lover is the one that would rather take their chances in the great soup, and hope that by odds, they will not be eaten. This flock-like behavior is indicative of herbivores, and oddly enough, peace loving humans. They feel safe in the numbers of the herd. But when the carnivore comes along, someone will be eaten. Then and only then, will they care. And life seems so unfair at those times.”

Leopold doesn’t know what to say. He looks wounded as the foundations of his reality clash with this strange man.
Fletcher gets up from his chair and paces the area between him and Leopold not out of a need to intimidate but because explosive passion radiates from Fletcher Finnegan, and it is too powerful to be contained within a chair. “I watched a cat once stare out a window to the world outside and I knew it was perplexed as to what that world was like. You see, it was a domestic cat, and had grown used to being fed, and lounging on sofas and relative luxury. And like the cat, men stare out the windows of life and think the whole world is within our little homes draped with simple luxuries. In the meantime, the world outside rolls at a feverish pace. Much of that world is invisible to the cat because it lacks the intelligence to see it. And men lack the intelligence just like their friends the cats, to see beyond the visible spectrum of the human eye.
“The Overman seeks the impossible for the impossible is reserved for limited thinking. Such words mean nothing. It’s the realms that most would crumble into dust, and suffer health ailments that the Overman flourishes. Stress rules as the monarch to the logic clinging bastions of mediocrity, those common men who flutter like bubbles of urine dispelled from a farm animal into a swift country stream to be washed away swiftly into the rivers and oceans of the world. From those silly bubbles espouse much of the world’s gossip in the remote hope that they will somehow find redemption from eliminating a superior opponent.”

Leopold is aghast at the energy coming off Fletcher Finnegan. The man doesn’t stop. Like a rock rolling downhill, he seems to just pick up more and more momentum. “I believe you are clinically insane. I can see that from the outset.”
Fletcher pauses a moment and captures Leopold’s eye. “Where the listener would respond something like, ‘Oh, I know what you mean. I’m in the same situation. I tried to get a round of golf in the other day, and just couldn’t do it.’ There isn’t any discussion that even though both parties are seeking to show one another how much more important the other is they are essentially both equal, and this may seem ok with them at that moment, because they are both confirming that they are lofty captains of industry, too busy for games. But what they fail to understand is that their wives are eyeing the stock boy and making plans for naked adventures with adolescent boys uncorrupted with enterprise and full of life vigor. Life marches on and leaves these silly bubbles bursting at mid-life with nothing to show for their pitiful lives but high blood pressure and obese stomachs toped with a turkey neck and some deranged back hair. While they have acquired cars and fancy garments to impresses young ladies and peers, the only people that truly find them attractive is prostitutes, because their money is green.”

Leopold is confused. “What does anything you just said have anything to do with what we were talking about?”
“Because you are a mere bubble in the grand scheme of things, ready to pop uneventfully at the conclusion of your life, and you search for meaning in your occupation in the arms of strange females.”

Leopold is startled by that comment. He had in fact purchased a prostitute the night before, and was confused that Fletcher could say such a thing. He couldn’t possibly have known about it. “We aren’t talking about me, this discussion is about you.” Leopold considers his next comment carefully. He looks over at the General for some reassurance, but the General has fallen into a trance. He grips his radio instead of a gun in hopes that should he need to call help, he’d have a quicker response from outside help than his own abilities with a gun. That said a lot about his state. “Do you consider yourself a savor, a savor of mankind?”

“Not a savor of mankind. But of myself.”

“This returns us to the element of religion, and your obligations to the greater good.”

Fletcher is now burning a hole through Leopold with his look. “That says a lot about you. You say I am wrong to call myself my own savior. My response is simple, what fool would consider anybody else their savior? For the answers to ones life is inside you. To look externally and place the responsibility on someone else is weak in the highest degree. To accept Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, anyone as your savior is a laughable task on a collision coarse for life long destruction. I would never think of considering the advice of anyone I’ve never met personally especially based on the third hand interpretation of their teachings. You have to look a person in the eye and assess their value, and only then can you determine their intent.”
“Religion provides a way to establish priorities in your life, priorities that reflect the greater good of mankind.” Leopold was satisfied with himself. “I have worked with many prisoners, and religion has helped many of them become much less violent and has given their lives meanings.”

“The most important thing for the male is not food, nor sex, but simply, tragically his place in the pecking order of all other males. This primate behavior will determine everything else in the male’s life, when he eats, whom he has sex with. Where he fits into that scheme of things is his god. And in your prisoners, Jesus becomes that dominate male that provides them with guidance. That is why it works.”

“So you are above this mode you say?” You consider this too small for your way of thinking?”

Fletcher doesn’t have to think about his answer. “Yes. The first step for the Overman is to move beyond this mode of thinking, and with it the social rejection that inevitably will follow. No true warrior could ever be concerned with such things as the opinion of another male, or to accept dominance by a superior male. It must be the Overman’s goal to become invincible in body and spirit. To reach beyond the sub atomic matter of things and master life at all levels. And defeat does not have a place with the Overman. They are only set backs in the ultimate battle where the forces of will intend to hold captive the soaring spirit.

“If a man can be bent to the will of inferior male flesh, they will surely bend to the will of the unseen. Such beings are bound to a purgatory existence and any life attached to these men will follow his torturous path. Wives will lust after rock stars, and children will seek refuge with other children in a game of the blind leading the blind. And those males seeking the acceptance of other males will put their balls upon the green grass of golf courses and pretend they are masters of something because they were invited into the circle of a dominate male. And as they putt that birdie on the back nine, their wives weep for a warrior.

An Overman can putt that birdie on the back nine, but his wife will not weep because she has a warrior. It’s more likely that should an Overman choose to stroll those green grasses of paradise, that he’d be by himself because no male is superior to him and the Overman is not looking for patsies to lick his heels and eat his table scraps. So often, the Overman will be alone, and he’s happy to be.”

“You speak with great command of knowledge, but your actions do not match your apparent passions. At the core of your ideology, and the reason you have made enemies of the world, is that you are promoting anarchy.” Leopold’s mind was spinning at the energy Fletcher projected, and the rate and quantity of information he let loose.

“I am said to promote anarchy and chaos. That freedom and its ideas must be maintained with government. Yet, I trust not anything that functions from greed, and has a heart so weak that it can be bought with token materialism. Much of our politics is laced with greed. That the ideas founding government will buckle under the weight of lazy greed. It’s as infectious as sex, and desires to be consumed in vast quantities. Behind the lazy ones is the hope that comfort will spring forth and save the soul from turmoil. With such a mind, the girth of the waist line expands and the body decays slowly to rot suitable only to parasitic insects. That is the only path for such minds and it’s this path that governments seek to lead civilization.” Fletcher looks at the General, and smiles. He doesn’t have to elaborate.

“Waging war against another dimension is in reality no different than war with another nation. The goals are the same. You must know how to deprive them of resources they need to conduct war against you. Once you control their supply routes, and divide up their ranks, you can begin to conquer them for your purpose. In the case of ulta-terrestrials, they crave from man the conduct of evil, that which causes emotional distress to other humans; murder, rape, corruption of all variety, crimes of inauthenticity. They feed off the energy of distress given off in disturbed states of mind. The first thing a warrior can do to rob them of this energy which forces their hand and into your strategy. This is when you can make them employees to your will and gain unseen allies. Reluctant allies none-the-less, and not allies that can be trusted for the moment you let down your guard they will attack. But they can be used to your purpose .

“Most of the damage these beings can do, not being natives of this dimension, are to propel us into committing problems for ourselves. The term of possession is often confused and misplaced as the workings of these conspirators. By manipulating our belief system into a narrow field of possibilities, they hide camouflaged against chaos which they are the architects.”
“Your pessimism is rotting your soul. That is clearly evident to me.” Leopold studies Fletcher to see if he will lash out at him. “Where are these plots? What you proclaim is no different from the muttering of religious fervor common to extremists of every order.”

“If you want to see the hidden workings of this maniacal plot attend the cultural activities of the drunken puppet, as they seek relief from life’s great pressures by the device of alcohol. Many women of proper composure lose control undeniably in such states and surrender their actions to forces they dare not acknowledge. For it is a proven fact that these dimension assailants crave our mating rituals and enjoy the raw energy derived from its indulgence. In biblical fragments it was said that the Gods of men had lain with his women. And so it is, these supposed gods still enjoy with tongues out of their mouths the turmoil and lust of mankind’s women and their ability to govern passions and play cupid. It is not an accident that pagan rituals have involved voluntary public sex practices among the elite class in order to given tokens of benefit for growing estates and earthly power. And so it goes as the daughters, and wives of mankind shake sweaty hips to the hypnotic effects of music, drunken males will betray their comrades with lust filled hearts, and put in jeopardy the women dependent on them as pillars of strength. Divided families are weak, and full of turmoil, and residing in the shadows of our time-space continuum are the malicious laughs of our true enemies. For every broken home, is a door opened by turmoil and depleted souls ready to be filled by the propaganda of the unseen. And contained within that propaganda are strings to pull and tug our species about in plots not of our mind.

“And the drunk later will laugh and brag about his state and the crimes committed there feeling that somehow there was reward in surrender, because the strings of propaganda move his mouth, and make his arms flail about independent of a conquered mind. And the women wake up and wonder where their cloths had gone and find themselves penetrated in a less than sacred manner, burying their disgrace with ideas of freedom and equality. Such is the plot of our foes.
“I can speak of this because I’ve looked it in the eye and I know its heart. When the Overman confronts an ultra-terrestrial, it is them that cower in fear. Age old tricks and nonsense no longer apply. And when the Mothman confronted me upon a lonely night where the blame might otherwise be applied to poltergeists and other ghostly apparitions, it projected an ultrasonic wave of fear intended for my mind, and what it found there was laughter at it’s silly mechanisms, and fear found a home in the fabled creature that has been our inspiration of gargoyles and angels for all known time. As I looked at its red penetrating eyes and knew that modern folklore had called it a mothman, I could see that it was in fact the legendary Giffin which has played such a roll and caused many to organize under its wings only to lead those into a slow corruption of their independent souls with a delusional reality of despair and dependence.”

Leopold was enwrapped in the curious thoughts of this very strange man, Fletcher Finnegan. Nothing the man said was conventional, yet he had an air of practicality about him. “You talk of these invisible creatures that manipulate us, but provide only theories. Their existence can hardly justify your aggressive actions.”

Fletcher smiled at Leopold’s feeble knowledge of history and began to pace faster as he spoke. “One thing you will not see pieced together regarding the success of enterprise and rise of business’s that perpetuate a veil for these mechanisms, is the true origin of this strategy.”

“Then enlighten me with some facts!” Leopold was feeling bold now, on sure ground. Facts could always be counted upon to revel neurotic fantasies of a convoluted mind. “Give me this history!”

“If you think you can fathom it, I will.” Fletcher stopped pacing now and had that piercing gaze. “But you will never view things the same way. Can you handle that?”

Leopold was guessing that much of what Fletcher was saying was an exaggeration and didn’t carry the weight of scientific proof with it so he haphazardly nodded his head.

Fletcher nodded in recognition. “First of all, Columbus did not discover America.”

“Hardly a brilliant opening to a grand theory, it is well known now that it was the Vikings that visited North America.”

“Oh, we do have a long way to go. We are far beyond that elementary idea now, let me assure you of that. Science has stumbled upon much greater mysteries since these shallow concepts of whether or not Vikings, or Columbus arrived in North America first. We are far beyond thoughts of Asians crossing a land bridge across the Bering Straight 20,000 years ago when the Earths oceans were 20 meters below sea level. Because if you consider the evidence, there were advanced civilizations that used stone to construct with all flourishing throughout the world at the same times. Consider Baalbek which predated Romans by thousands of years in their colossal building abilities, the city of Nan Madol on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean called Pohnpei that built huge stone structures with stones weighing as much as 50 tons. One of the greatest mysteries there is not how they built such large structures on an isolated island with no technology but that a basalt road enters the Pacific ocean and emerges thousands of miles to the south at another tiny island called Rarotanga. Then if you move to the continent of South America, in Boliva you’ll find Tiahuanaco a city as complex as Jericho, or Jerusalem that co-existed with those urban centers.”

Leopold was beside himself. “I have never heard of these places. Jericho and Jerusalem certainly, but not those other places, how can you propose a link with those biblical anchors?”

‘If you consider that stone erodes quite a lot in 10,000 years, think how much erodes in 100,000. It is entirely possible that in 400,000 years from now everything in New York City could have eroded away completely unless some of the steel within those structures would happen to become fossilized. All those cities share a common fascination with stone and an incredible level of engineering, and based on the rate of decay in just several thousand years, the sources of that technology may have long since vanished and is only reflected in these seemingly remote places.

Leopold was out of his comfort zone and he wanted to lash out at Fletcher for unknown reasons. “Evidence of this would exist in the fossil record.”

“It is a rare set of circumstances that produce a fossil. You have to die in some mud and hope that something doesn’t eat you. The calcium in the bones has to be replaced by minerals over thousands of years, and in that time lots of fortunate occurrences must occur in order for a fossil to be created.”

“There would still be evidence of what you are saying”

“Ironically, you’re correct, and there is. You only have to do a bit of looking to find that the bones of man have been found near the bones of dinosaurs, and that human footprints walk in the same places as dinosaurs. It has been found that complicated jewelry was embedded in lumps of coal which take millions of years to form. So in short, there are a lot of unanswered questions regarding our human past.”

“This is preposterous, these assumptions you are making.” Leopold Smith had heard a lot of cases of dementia, and treated cases of manic-depression and this was text book stuff. Fletcher Finnegan certainly contained most all elements of the manic definition where victims often feel they are on a special mission, who they consider grandiose but in reality is delusional. A person in this manic state can experience a break from reality. Most of the time these emotions will lead to severe anxiety and can become very irritable, but many cases involve grandiose moments of euphoria. “Are you on medication for your condition, Mr. Finnegan?”

Fletcher paused a moment and quizzically gazed at the analysts. “You truly don’t understand what this means.”
Leopold was not attempting to hold back his laughter. “You have a grandiose sense of purpose that is not unlike many of the religious fanatics that have created cults and anarchy which is exactly what you are accused of.”
“Which is exactly what I was leading to by coincidence,” Fletcher said as he resumed his pacing. “You asked for history and I am preparing to give you just that.”

Leopold nodded agreement in a condescending way that Fletcher did not find offensive. The two men were far apart anchored in their very different beliefs.

Fletcher looked at the General who was still silent, arms crossed to protect his own shallow beliefs but avoiding eye contact with Fletcher. “I have named for you several cities not spoken of in history books, yet go deep into our human history. And even with all the mystery contained there, they fail to even compare to what we find right in the middle of North America.”
“How does this tie into your personal rebellion for which you are convicted?”

“Younger than those other described places, but equally ignored in the context of history was Cahokia, located just outside of present day St. Louis. What many don’t acknowledge is this part of the world had a major impact on the course of modern civilization. This city to the very day boasts a pyramid that is the third largest pyramid by volume in the world and its discovery was by chance. An entire neighborhood was built upon its ruins before it was discovered that those large hills in the backyards of those residences were not just hills, but huge mounds built by a forgotten civilization. St. Louis was built before Archeology became a science so nobody knew what to make of the strange relics found while they built the homes. But as Anthropology and Archeology matured in the early years of the twentieth century much was discovered about this huge city that reflects the complexity of a Mesopotamian culture, and not the typical hunting and gathering tribes of Native Americans.

“Cahokia was called the City of the Sun. And its leader was symbolized with a bird man whom was worshipped with human sacrifice. Many of Cahokia’s rituals took place in the nearby caves that lay under present day St. Louis, and this culture seems to be an advance progression of several, much older metropolitan centers that covered southern Illinois and eastern Missouri.

“Five hundred years after the demise of Cahokia and hearing the legends of the area from the current residence who were Native Americans, American settlers named many of the monuments found in the area by names of Giant City and Little Egypt but built their homes and cities on the ruins of these ancient North American cities. But it didn’t stop the Mormons from coming to the area to start their religion.

“In New York, Joseph Smith was visited by an angel in much the way that angels visited biblical prophets throughout the bible. In fact, he believed that two of the figures that came to him in a vision were none the other than God the father, and Jesus his son, and they told him that all the religions of the world was wrong, and they gave him instructions to start a new church that would become the foundations of the Mormon religion. He founded his religion based on a long buried book inscribed on metal leaves and this book told of God’s dealings with Ancient Israelite inhabitants which he claimed were the real lost tribe of Israel here in North America. Of course Smith was labeled a threat to the other established religions and this propelled him and his followers to flee westward where they settled in the area of Missouri and Illinois where ancient relics of lost civilizations were everywhere and allowed Smith to sell his religion to curious settlers. Of course the established religions found Smith a threat to their order and was finally killed by the overwhelming forces that aligned against him and his church around the time that Smith announced his candidacy for President of the United States. Once Smith was killed, the Mormons fled further west and any trace of ancient ties to the lost tribes of Israel in America were ignored by the other established orders.

“Meanwhile, Adam Lemp immigrated from Germany, spent some time in nearby Cincinnati, and moved on to St Louis where he found that he could begin his brewery empire by using those caves of Cahokia as an ideal location for the lager process. After Adam’s death, his son William inherited the estate and began an empire that would change the face of America forever.
The Lemp Mansion was built on a location that allowed him to use the caves to get to his brewery nearby. The Lemp family loved the caves and actually built a theater and a pool under their home where private actors would perform vaudeville acts for the family. However, the old curse of Cahokia seems to have infected the mind of the Lemps and one by one throughout the years, suicides occurred at the strange mansion that still is a hot spot of paranormal activity. The Lemp’s are said to still haunt the area and the brewery empire they started began a culture of alcohol consumption in this country by being the first to supply beer coast to coast. The caves under St Louis have been sealed as best they could when the construction of Interstate 55 was built. These caves are now referred to as the Lost Caves of St Louis, and are all but forgotten to the inhabitants of the city above.

“Modern day Cahokia is just 8 miles to the west of downtown St. Louis. Everyday, thousands of people drive by the giant mounds of Cahokia and have no mind of the incredible civilization that existed there prior to the European immigration that formed the United States. The reason, Cahokia is part of East St. Louis and the incredible crime rate there. Although it is never discussed, East St. Louis is part of the curse of Cahokia and the same curse that fills the Lost Caves of St. Louis. There is far more going on there than meets the eye.”

Leopold could do nothing but shake his head. “We are in Ohio, Mr. Finnegan. Your history of these areas is fascinating but irrelevant.”

“Not irrelevant, but connected. Connected to the mounds of Cahokia are the mysterious Serpent Mound and other mounds of Southern Ohio, which dominate our area. Dates take the construction of the mound to around 500 BC and it is quite obvious that the mound is designed to be seen from the air much like the images of the Nazca of Peru. The odd thing about the construction of this mound is that it is built on the edge of a giant impact crater dating back up to 320 million years. This crater is over 5 miles across and is largely eroded now and virtually undetectable except to the scientific mind.”
Leopold could do nothing but frown. “What does this have to do with St Louis?”

Fletcher was smiling now. “All over this southern Ohio area, from the Native Americans, thunder birds are part of their tribal lore. In fact, the Iroquois nation which consisted of 5 primary tribes that went from New York all the way down to the Ohio River valley believed hunting in the West Virginia and Kentucky areas were sacred and settling in those areas were forbidden by the All Father. The five tribes of the Iroquois were told to unite by a being that came down from the sky.

“Anyway, for years a bird man, or thunderbird spirit has dominated many of the areas along the Ohio river for the entire length of it in Native American lore. It was nothing short of a Bird Man King that controlled the City of the Sun, Cahokia to the west, and in this region, that same character has been called Mothman since the frequent sighting during the bridge collapse at Point Pleasant.”

“This does not answer my question.”

“Just north of Point Pleasant is the mysterious Moonville. A mining town that thrived at the turn of the 20th century but had a violent past and eventually has been erased from the face of the Earth. At its peak, Moonville only had a hundred people in this back woods town, but it was a major stop off along a railroad that connected Washington DC to St Louis. At this town, treachery and debauchery ruled up until its demise and to this day is heavily haunted. Yet nothing but a tunnel that ran through a large hill remains of the town. This tunnel is the portal used by Mothmen that enter and exit our dimensional space and have had their hand in mankind’s affairs for millions of years.”

Leopold is more than confused. “You’ve talked about strange cities, Mormons, ghosts, and breweries but nothing to justify your crimes and obvious psychosis. It is obvious you fear society, and hide that fear in an extensive knowledge of history, that while impressive, does not justify your station.”

“The influence of a race of beings that came to inhabitants from above permeates the mythology of Native Americans and the artifacts left behind show advanced knowledge of events, such as the knowledge of the impact crater. Mothmen are seen by many even today. The only reason they aren’t seen by everyone is that our species is preoccupied with their busy lives and a rapidly growing technology.

“I can say for myself that I fear no human being or living entity on this planet or elsewhere. To fear the mediocre tendencies of the feeble ones is a crime against yourself. They will seek to use fear to place you about in invisible shackles of bondage. The villainy upon you by these beings is a crime. It is an assault against the nature of life which desires freedom and the impulse to live.

“This notion that one should not strive to be superior is preposterous. What gain is there in pretending to be a fool so those in power don’t feel the threat? I tell you this mythology was invented to suppress the strong, and prevent challenges to phantom thrones that make up the mind of a tyrant’s thoughts. Pretending to be a fop with thoughts about the weather, foreign and domestic policy, and sports so to stay under the radar, to what avail?

“I have been told many times to maintain such a low profile. I’ve been told to not be so good. I have seen men applaud other men for showing weakness with women. I have seen much backslapping to the drunk that collapses unconscious on a Friday night, as opposed to the hard worker that stays behind a book all night to gain an advantage over their opponents. I have heard many preachers of peace proclaim honor in such a mundane embrace of values.

“Think how preposterous it sounds to hear tales of a night with friends where everyone became “trashed” and so much so that they cannot remember the evening. Compare this to the heroic figure that donates their evening to helping people, or improving themselves. I say that it is the times formation around control that endorses idiotic behavior and encourages us all to pursue that course. The trick to all is that there is profit in failure, that you will succeed if you stay under the radar and not become a threat to the current administrations by being the well behaved lamb. Look at the established religions, where the behavior of Jesus is shown to be the way to everlasting glory. Jesus is even referred to as a lamb. Does no one question these motives? With the fine mind provided to humans, why are humans so susceptible to bondage? Does it not seem strange that so called Christians, Hindus, Muslims, even Buddists seem so preoccupied with enduring the pain of this current life in order to reach some evasive light at the end of the tunnel, that we should joyfully endure our masters in this life for trade of everlasting glory.

“You ask me what it means to be fearless. For there is no deceit when you stand before the Mothmen, for they can peer into your heart. To be fearless is to realize that the only privacy in the world is that for which you give yourself. It is in accepting that eyes are always upon you, even in seclusion. But freedom from this comes from being superior to your opponents, superior to those that can peer into your soul for they dare not, because what they see there is something they cannot master, and fear then becomes their constant companion, a position they are not accustomed to. There is no lying about this kind of fearlessness. You can not fake this with haughty talk and bold steps. You have to be it, and before you can, you must face every demon that resides within you and eliminate every vice that acts as strings to those diabolical puppeteers.
“Alas, no sooner after much tribulation is a mind under assault by sirens and the timing is no less obvious to the eye trained to the mechanisms of the machine and its workings. The poor woman knows not why she feels such but wants to believe in the magic of love and is blinded by the stage props.

“And what are these architects of desire, these cupids of destiny. That nest of comfort all women in their souls seek where life meaning sings acceptance of purpose. The game is treacherously shallow. Is it an accident that our images of cupid contain wings on Eros, son of Aphrodite? In what sector of the human experience do wings get placed on characters of mythology?

“This appeasement of spirits is not an unusual idea. Vikings were among the first to use decorative ship figureheads. They believed that these heads contained the spirit of the ship and removed them when sailing for home so not to offend or frighten the spirits that guarded their homes.

“This is why it is celebrated to exist in a drunken state. Males hungry for reassurance will relish in the ecstasy of seeing a potential rival at their own level, or better yet, below. The same preoccupation rings with women. Adulterous conduct is a welcome entry into the fraternity of testosterone. There you will find men that have neglected their wives into cellulite temples, yearning for sexual conquest in the arms of the easily manipulated. Profess the same philosophy and watch the gates of power swing open wide. To offer your vices is protection that you will not challenge their crown, for every male assesses his competition.”

……………………………………………………………….

Rich Hoffman

http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior

www.overmanwarrior.com

The Nature of Government

On the morning of December 8, 2010, I went to work as I normally do, only the temperature was hovering just above 10 degrees with a wind chill shaping up to a goose egg. I was riding my motorcycle, as I do all year, rain, snow or tornados, and the explanation for our governmental troubles came to me in the beauty of simplicity.

Many people wonder why I do things like riding motorcycles in sub-zero temperatures, and the explanation I could give them isn’t something they typically would understand from their perspective. I do it for what comes to my mind in the pain and endurance of the exercise. Often, being in such a predicament, which takes a person out of their comfort zones, will clarify thoughts. Since I do a lot of thinking, there are a lot of thoughts to clarify, so driving to work in extremely cold temperatures helps.

On this particular morning, I looked at the cars around me. At a stop light the woman next to me had her heat turned all the way up and she had on a hood, windows rolled up firmly. She looked at me like I was nuts. At the next light was a man in a pick-up truck. He looked like a man that fancy’s himself as a rough and tumble individual, had mud flaps with the silhouette of naked women on them. He refused to make eye contact. I could see his hair blowing in the warmth of his cockpit from the turned up heat, again windows rolled up tight.

I thought this morning of all the books I had read about Native American culture, of Tecumseh, Blue Jacket, the great Shawnee nation, the Five Nations of the Iroquois. I thought of Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa’s eating the heart of his enemies like they were just apples, many times while the victims were still alive. I thought of Chief Seattle and his great speech. And as I thought of those men, and the nature they revered, I thought of President Obama and his famous speech to the Fort Hood victims, “I want to put a shout out to the Native American’s,” or something to that ridiculous effect. It was another car that pulled up next to me at yet another light, with the exhaust from his vehicle dancing around his car and whipping around me in the swirling frozen wind. This guy was a typical suburbanite, well-shaven, clean cut, and looking straight ahead at the road ahead. Again, he didn’t make eye contact, and he reminded me of Obama, just going through the motions of living keeping his eyes on the road ahead, but not willing to look at things to the side of him that didn’t fit his learned behavior. For all I know the guy could live in my neighborhood.

On the rest of my journey to work, I thought of the train trolley down in Cincinnati, Strickland’s letter to Kasich on the high speed rail deal, Obama agreeing to the Bush Tax cuts, I thought of the TSA situation, and I thought about the Lakota Levy that is sure to come again, especially once the unions discover that they will not be able to maintain the level of income they’ve negotiated for themselves when Governor Kasich cuts education even more to get Ohio back on a balanced budget track.

Who is to say that riding a motorcycle in the extreme cold is wrong? Only in relation to the rest of orthodox society is it looked down on. To me, it makes perfect sense. It clears my head, like I discussed, and it saves a ton of fuel. With fuel climbing up over $3 bucks a gallon, I don’t want to pay more for fuel, so I’ll buy less. I have a perfectly nice car in the driveway, but I don’t like to use it for all the reasons described.

Big government types have associated themselves with the green initiative to save the planet from human impact. These are the same individuals that roll their windows up tight to protect their skin from the cold weather. They are not what in my opinion an environmentalist is.

Nature is not a fragile organism. Nature lives in the extreme cold, and the excessive heat and it sends hurricanes to destroy entire cities that humans build for themselves. Yet if you consider what the modern progressive minded person asserts with their big government ideas, you would at first think these people have mankind’s best interest at the front of their minds. But when you look at their actions from the perspective of a motorcycle in the brutal cold of a sunless morning, you see how infantile these people are.

Which is more beautiful, the nature that can be seen from the Appalachian Trail atop Mount LeConte or the nature in someone’s back year where all the bushes and trees are trimmed nicely, and the grass is cut, and every rock placed in the yard was put there by the owner of the property.

The degree to which human beings attempt to alter nature is called government. If you look to the forest, where mankind has not put their feet, nature thrives. Trees grow, animals eat each other, and water flows in the path of least resistance. Trees in the forest compete for light, the smaller ones get pushed aside by the bigger ones, and survival of the fittest is the general rule. In the forest, the will to survive is so great that a tree will sink roots into rock in order to get what it needs. The nature of human beings is not different from the organism of a tree.

In the back yard garden, trees are pruned and sculpted to fit the contours of homes, or other trees. Plants are mulched to assist them to grow, and shrubbery is trimmed and controlled. The grass is cut to a desired level, and in some cases watered to ensure its survival.

Our government is simply a garden of which we all have different ideas of where the plants should go, or what flowers we need to plant and where. But the understanding of it all is that it is purely cosmetic. All the rules of mankind are simply made up in the minds of the human being. In the global neighborhood, what is happening in America, is pruning, where the branches are being cut away so that the other trees in the neighborhood can grow, because the big tree of America sucks up all the water, at least according to these green thumbed gardeners called politicians.

The fertilizer and various chemicals we use on our lawns are simply equitable to the stimulus money government has issued to grow the economy.

From the cold morning of December 8, 2010 it became excessively clear to me that the same people tucked away in their warm cars are the same people that buy flowers for their gardens in the spring, and cut their grass on Saturday afternoons in the heat of a summer day. And they’ll plant a tree in this location or that location hoping that one day the tree will provide some shade. And these people take this same mentality to their business, whether they directly work for government, or if they simply vote in the grand idea of a republic, and the politicians they elect do all those things and more to their lawns. And they believe with all their hearts and souls that the work they’re doing is important, and that they must trim trees, and cut grass or use fertilizer in order to make our world grow.

What they fail to understand is that nature doesn’t need human assistance at all. We are simply guests that have arrived like a pimple on the face of geologic time. Our duration on the plant will come and go without the earth hardly noticing. Global warming and every related issue are only musings from human beings that have an unhealthy belief of their universal importance.

For all the gardens those humans build for themselves will be wiped away in time by the true brutality of nature and its selection of what is beautiful or not, what lives what dies, and what is strong and what is weak.

It never made sense to me why so many atheists and others without some sort of faith to ground their terrestrial selves seemed prone to migrate to the conservation movement so embraced by the left, and why so many young people seem attracted to those mentalities. It’s because their undeveloped minds have not yet worked out their place in the universe. This is why so many senior citizens tend to vote conservative, while the young tend to vote liberal. The young still cleave to the ego based notion that they are all there is. The old know better and have learned after a lifetime of living. This is the difference. The silly, small minded politicians think they can actually improve nature with their juvenile influence. But all they really end up doing in the scheme of things is move some rocks around and plant some trees, most of which are quickly uprooted as soon as a major storm comes.

All the policies of mankind fall under this description. So is this a proclamation of anarchy? No. When I go to the forest, I walk the trail, which is not natural, but created by man. I build a fire with the wood that falls from the trees. And I leave the campsite looking the same as it did before I arrived. If I build a home with what the forest provides, I do it understanding that within 100,000 years everything I create will return to nature including every item a human ever created.

Notions like Social Security, Wiki Leaks, Communism, teacher contracts, health care, all laws, all government and every roadway built will be swallowed by nature in a relatively short time geologically speaking.

If the human race wanted to truly survive, it would copy nature. Not try to corrupt nature with their undeveloped ego desire to build a better garden. America was modeled after nature, as envisioned by John Locke in the late 1600’s. But during the growth of government periods, particularly in the 20th century, America has become a land of gardeners instead of the natural element.

Our society needs to ask how much we want to spend in taxes to supply a garden that is purely cosmetic to begin with. Because that’s all any of it is. It’s just gardening by gardeners that have the audacity to believe they can do it better than nature.

I ran into a community once that reflected some of what I’m talking about. It was a little neighborhood on top of Mt LeConte that serves tourists wishing to climb that mountain. I’ve been to Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge many times and Mt LeConte is the big mountain approximately 10 miles from downtown Gatlinburg which looms over the town. It is the highest peak visible from Pigeon Forge and is an unmistakable monster of a mountain. From the ground you’d never know that speckled across the top is a community of cabins, with some residents that work up there, and guests renting cabins to stay for the night. There’s a mess hall and a couple of rest rooms to facilitate everyone’s needs.

From the top of the mountain, in that little village, all the great monuments of Pigeon Forge are almost completely invisible. The community resides over 6000 feet which doesn’t sound like much compared to mountains in the west, or in the Himalayas but the top of Mt LeConte has its own weather patterns. Its peaks are often submerged in a cloud layer and take the full brunt of weather patterns migrating across Tennessee and Kentucky from the west. But at such a height all the monuments of tourism are just little specs. Nothing looks too complicated from that vantage point.

From atop that mountain, the world makes sense. The people you meet up there say hello and are generally happy to see you. What everyone shares that arrive at the distant land is they had to work hard to get there. There’s only three ways that will get you to the top. You have to walk and climb, you can take a llama, or you can be dropped off with a helicopter, which brings supplies to the top of the mountain. It’s as primitive, yet as civilized of a place as anywhere I’ve ever been. On that mountain perspective is easy, just like in the harsh cold on a motorcycle in mid December. That rugged paradise is virtually a stones throw from downtown Gatlinburg with all the tourist spots, yet the two worlds are diametrically opposed.

That’s when it is easy to see the only difference between the two is the inventions of man, which are transitory at best. In Gatlinburg you run into thousands of people and say hello to nobody. On top of the mountain you say hello to everyone because everyone respects each other because everyone worked hard to get there.

Nature requires one thing and that’s respect. Respect for yourself. Respect for the power of nature. And respect that each moment could be your last.

In the politics of mankind, their laws mean nothing because politicians cannot create respect. And no amount of tax money or social program will give someone respect for anything. They can make a garden look nice, but nobody truly respects the garden because it’s contrived and manipulated by the gardener, and artificially watered and fertilized.

Nature is the only true gardener.

Rich Hoffman

http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior

www.overmanwarrior.com

The Standoff!

I’m going to try something different. I spend a lot of time thinking about abstract concepts, and piecing together things that don’t always easily appear to connect. I can give a lot of evidence as to why it’s important to think outside the box, and I can even help some that are close to being able to think that way, cross over that invisible line and begin practicing it.

But for the general person busy with their lives, that need information quickly, and in a form they understand, fiction is the best way to lay out an argument. As an artist, the best way for a writer to convey an argument is with a work of fiction so that the concept can be held up to reality and measured. The following short piece is from a work connected to my Symposium of Justice novel. And I will begin letting out small bits of that work to support some of the concepts discussed at this site.

So enjoy this small work titled The Standoff, and think of it in an abstract before trying to apply any meaning.

Fletcher appraised the massive influx of the troops as they surrounded the parameter of his property. He noted that they stayed off about 100 yards. They were going to try and take him by force as opposed to an air strike. That was the best option for him, although it wouldn’t have mattered either way. The result would be the same.

He knew they’d try to gas him out, and if that didn’t work they’d shell his home. He could see the mortar placements set up at the appropriate range. He could also see the snipers stationed strategically in the distance. Many of them were well over 100 yards, and he thought he could see most of them. He suspected that there were others hidden on the rooftops, and in trees that eluded him, but that wasn’t important. Knowing the details of their where-a-bouts where not important to his strategy, in fact, that was their intent, to overwhelm him. He would do fine as long as he didn’t allow himself to get lost in the details.

He had heard that the devil was in the details by more than one person in his life. But the devil seeks to corrupt the mind with those same details by pulling the mind into his domain where he can corrupt and inflict doubt. Very few human beings in their entire lifetimes found a way to master the art of details.

Misty walked up next to him and gently placed her hand on his shoulder. “There’s too many this time.”

“This is no different than before.” Fletcher was aware that he sounded harsh, but he was mentally prepared for war. “Whether it’s ten or ten thousand, their failure is in their trust that numbers will be to their advantage.”

“What will you do?”

“I want you to take the kids and go to the grocery.”

“The grocery?”

“Yes, don’t react to this as if anything is any different from any other day. You take the kids and go to the store. Bring back some food for later. That will keep you safe and off my mind.”

“They’ll never let us leave.”

“Yes they will, they can’t afford to have women and children slaughtered in this media event they are holding. They’ll be glad to see you go. They have not formally charged you with any crimes and you can move about unimpeded. To restrain you now will only irritate me further and they won’t risk that. They seek a peaceful end before the day is out. That is why they’ve already lost. Because I seek war, and blood and I will spill it at their expense.”

“But what will you do?”

“I will lure them away from the castle. They think I built it to hold off an onslaught. Their strategy is to get me to emerge from it by lack of choice. I will do so quickly at the beginning of the fight. I will go into their lines where their mortars, snipers and heavy weapons will destroy their own people. I will not stay here on ground they dictate.”

“Can you get out there that fast? That will be a lot of ground to cover. They’ll have lots of open chances to take a shot at you.” Misty was not a military woman, but in her marriage to Finnegan she had learned his ways. She had seen enough to make the kinds of observations that would make a general proud. She had seen Fletcher do amazing things and was accustom to his late night workouts. She knew his mind believed he could manipulate physical law with sheer confidence, and had seen it work on much smaller numbers. He had survived incredibly the standoff at the river last year at Ben Carter’s residence against a small attachment of elite troops and the police force of Fort Seven Mile. That day Fletcher had returned to her covered in scratches and holes penetrated his clothing where bullets had narrowly missed him hundreds of times. She had called him lucky where he refuted her with similar characters in history. George Washington had dodged similar odds when he acted heroically at Fort Duquesne having his body riddled with bullet holes that had never found their mark. Stonewall Jackson had showed the same kind of valor needed in the battle of Bull Run to defy all odds. And General Patton also survived numerous brushes with death, and Fletcher often cited how both Jackson and Patton had suffered silly accidents that either caused amputations, or were paralyzed prior to their deaths. It was a fascinating fact that some of the great minds of military like Patton believed that he was directly reincarnated from Hannibal.

Fletcher believed that in the heat of battle great men rose to great achievement because their minds were focused on the task and their beliefs manipulated all the events on the battlefield. Where some would believe that some sort of force such as karma was responsible for balancing out the lives of these same men be subjecting them to freakish accidents, Fletcher believed those men despised times of peace so intensely that their strong minds actually attracted the negative events that sealed their fates.

It was not unusual for him to stay up late into the night reading volumes of books and would tell her of his night time adventures when she awoke for breakfast. Alexander the Great, Frederick Nietzche, Socrates, Galileo, and many others found illness, and social castration part of their later lives leaving only history to vindicate their work into a respectable status. Nietzche was a favorite of Fletcher and she was shocked to learn that copies of the fourth installment of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, arguably Fletcher’s favorite book, only saw a printing of 40 initial copies.

Fletchers other favorite book was The Book of Five Rings by the undefeated samurai Miyamoto Musashi and she knew that Fletcher’s standoff here was modeled from his study of that book. It was Musashi that had been independent of any social clans in Japan, and offered himself as a samurai for hire. That left him a target to every political entity and forced him to survive many battles where he was severely outnumbered.

Fletcher had already achieved much of what Musashi had. His standoff at the river should have been enough. There would be stories told for years about his exploits and if he were not considered an outlaw, society would make him the hero of the nation. Quietly, the political powers that made up “The System,” had shown an interest in making peace with Fletcher. Once his identity was revealed, and it was known that he had wealth, they sent representatives to make peace, but Fletcher could not be bought. He sent them away with the same audacity that he had these last two visitors.

Was it madness that looked out across the yard and showed no fear at 5000 troops with the taste of blood in their throats for his death? She wasn’t sure. What she did know was that if she stopped him he would be perpetually unhappy. Even though social duty may dictate that she talk her husband out of this, he would never-the-less be arrested and thrown in jail for many years at this point so there really wasn’t any turning back. After all, nobody in history had survived a standoff of this magnitude. Nobody but Buddha had ever done such a thing.

Fletcher Finnegan did not attribute himself with the Buddha, but there wasn’t any other image that came to her mind as she studied her husband gazing calmly out the window. Mara, the evil one had tried to prevent the enlightenment of the Buddha with temptations, one of the most dramatic of which was a massive army that promised the Buddha annihilation if he did not remove himself from his immovable spot. She was never completely clear why Mara called off his army and left the Buddha to his enlightenment. She could see for herself that Fletcher’s calm resistance to this army would not bring peace. He would have to go and fight and all logic would guarantee his destruction.

At any other time in history, if this would have been Christ, he would have been captured uneventfully and killed brutally. In fact, in all of history she couldn’t think of any time that surrender was not considered the noblest thing to do, and that didn’t make any sense to her. Even with the world seemingly at her doorstep wanting to kill her husband and destroy everything that was her family, she couldn’t think of another time where another human being would be poised to make such a stand.

It is said that Mara, the evil one, tried to prevent this great occurrence. He first tried to frighten Siddhartha with storms and armies of demons. Siddhartha remained completely calm. Then he sent his three beautiful daughters to tempt him, again to no avail. Finally, he tried to ensnare Siddhartha in his own ego by appealing to his pride. That, too, failed. Siddhartha, having conquered all temptations, touched the ground with one hand and asked the earth to be his witness.

“I will give them nothing to shoot at.” Fletcher was aware of her thoughts, but did not remove his war readiness. He knew she understood. “You have to understand, they want only for this event to be over. The shooters out there rely on the next man to take the shot, and nobody is solely responsible, which is why they will fail. They have spent their time from arrival to now with fat thoughts like their leader. They trust that mass alone will do the job even though they have been instructed by their superiors to take this situation with utmost seriousness. The men behind those guns will be looking for where they think I’ll be. At the distance they are placed they will be severely restricted in movement. To get a clear shot at me, they will need me to be as still and predictable as possible.”

She looked at what he looked at, and noticed that most of the infantry was in the front. “Are you going to use the tunnel?”

“When we built the place, I suspected something like this would happen eventually. It comes out right in the middle of their mass. It will take away their guns and put them at close range for hand to hand combat. Many will seek to back away from the fight when it starts but will trample their own in an attempt to make their guns useful. I will use their confusion as my troops.”

“But you said they would probably resort to the B2 bomber.”

“They may try that, and if that’s the case, you and the kids need to be far away from here, at least forty miles.” He turned to her. “Do you understand?”

“And this town will be annihilated. All the work you’ve done to bring justice to this community would be for nothing. Thousands of people will be killed, and for what? If you surrender you could save them all.” She said that knowing what his reaction would be, but she felt she needed to say something.

“Save them in what way? They are all on strings they can’t see, living lives that aren’t their own. It is not me that brings death to them.”

“But your actions brought them.”

“The responsibility to annihilate this community with nuclear destruction will be up to executives. We’ll see what happens.”

“If you last that long.”

Fletcher doesn’t offer a response. Her point is clear and he isn’t in a position to make promises. Fate is much of what you make of it, and he was making his moment by moment. He was in uncharted water here.

“There is no way to camouflage any of this but as an act of terrorism. You will be labeled an enemy of the United States.”

“You know I love this country. Most of its history was formed on war, and this is no different. You know that.”

Misty paused a long time. Troop movements had settled down and everyone was in place. “I know you do.”

“Only in the context of history will anyone understand. Long after the dead from today are buried and their relatives evaporate into earth. When the sensibilities of orthodox behavior align society into rational thought, much more will be understood.”

Rich Hoffman

http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior

www.overmanwarrior.com

Ten Rules to Live By

I do sympathize with the many who question my intent as they try to ascertain my motivations and political positions. “Do I want a political office,” writes one beleaguered email sender. “You want publicity,” writes another. “You want to stay in the times of the caveman,” says yet another.

I read and listen to such things with humor because it would take a lifetime for many of those people to understand what and why I think the way I do. I was doing much of this work before I ever entered the Lakota School Levy issue, and I’ll be doing the same work long after it passes. It just so happens that time and fate have intersected over the issue of education funding.

So as a contribution of insight I offer something I wrote back in 2004 in my book, The Symposium of Justice. It’s the Ten Rules for Living as displayed in the back of the book and discussed in the chapter called, The Overman. (Hint, this is where the term Overmanwarrior comes from, the term reminds me of these ten rules) It is my hope that this list might provide the needed insight for those that seek an answer to their lingering queries.

The following appears on page 187 of The Symposium of Justice, Cliffhanger’s Ten Rules to Live by

1. To honor women, they are the pillars of society.

2. Stand as an example of the highest moral order.

3. Avoid mental depletion such as intoxication, and ignorance.

4. Pursue learning like a person on fire pursues water.

5. Live with integrity, where values are in line with behavior.

6. Live the given life, not the dreams of others.

7. In a crisis handle everything calmly and without confusion.

8. Be capable of firmness in the heart.

9. Sorrow is everywhere, accept it with a smile.

10. Resist hiding in numbers, stand as an individual contributor.

I wrote the Symposium of Justice to teach my kids the values I wanted them to carry into adulthood. But I offer it to anyone looking to improve their life. I live by those values and it has always worked for me. When you are living by those principles, no amount of money, no official title, and no peer acceptance can surpass the benefits. The key to fixing the world is within you. Fix that and you fix the world. . All such things are purely cosmetic aspects to a social existence. Participation in any and all will ultimately lead to an empty life laced with dissatisfaction. So read of the above list what you will. Live your life and maybe make your own list. Because one thing is certain, and that is nothing is truly certain. All you truly ever have is what you build inside yourself and can therefore offer others in the form of relationships.

No school, political party, or career choice can give you that

Those are the values I live by.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior www.overmanwarrior.com

Institutional Failure and the Healing Power of Key West

What follows is a history of institutionalism in the United States and its impact on the minds of the American people. It is long, so be ready to take your time. But if you stick with it, you might find it very rewarding.

So enjoy. Tweet

What do Walt Disney, John D. Rockefeller, Bill Gates, Henry Ford, Richard Branson, and Rachel Ray all have in common; none of those people have a college degree. It has always confounded me as to why and how the myth that an institution can give someone the needed components to be successful became such a universally accepted concept.

There is a lot of history on the subject of the progressive movement and its evolution from 1880 to the modern era, so there is no need to lay it all out in this work. The research is there for anyone that wants it. The important thing is to ask, why do some of the most powerful and successful people in the world push formal schooling aside. After all, if parents really wanted their kids to have a good life, why would they steer them in that direction spending tens of thousands of dollars on education per year when some of the most successful people in our history have either not gone to formal schooling, or had to drop out because the institution got in the way of their personal gumption.

The answer is remarkably foolish and I’m going to spell it out here. First we’ll deal with what the problem with college education is, then we’ll deal with the impact it has had on society.

College, and most of our education in general from grade school and up, is just forms of analytic thinking. This thinking is extremely useful for finding out where you’ve been, and it can tell you where you’re going if you can find a way to incorporate it with creative thinking, I’ll explain that in a minute. The successful people mentioned, and many others, realize that while the world outside the class room is going by, the college professors are insisting to freeze time while their class is being conducted to study processes.

In management, I have watched hundreds of college educated, well intentioned souls wrestle with a complicated problem for days, or weeks, only to have someone who works on the floor solve the problem in a matter of hours, which of course is quite insulting to the person with a degree. They are supposed to be smarter, and better equipped to deal with problems. After all, that’s what society told them would happen if they pursued a degree.

What they ended up with was a job, and a decent paying job relatively speaking. Enough money to make a decent living, buy a decent home, drive a decent car, and take a decent vacation. But deep inside most everyone is some silly little form of rot that knows they sold themselves short. They wonder how such uneducated specimens as the laborer could know how to reason anything out or have any ideas of value.

The best example I’ve ever heard of why the process of higher education, which is the parent to analytic thinking, comes from Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. In that fine book, Pirsig paints a picture of this analytic process by referencing a train moving down a long track. The track represents the quality of whatever you’re dealing with, whether it is business, or your personal life. At the front of the train is a locomotive of course, and behind it are box cars of cargo. Within each box car is the history of whatever is behind pulled by the train, he calls this Classic Knowledge. In business, it’s the sales records, inventory variances, staffing requirements, engineering development, etc. In your personal life; it’s much the same, mortgage values, asset management, and livelihood issues. Pirsig made the designation that at the front of the train is a thing called Romantic Knowledge. This is important because on the train tracks of life, seldom does the track just run infinitely off into the horizon, but rather there are many decisions that must be made along the way. And someone has to be at the front of the train to see those changes coming and make the decision to take a different course when those situations present themselves. Romantic Knowledge is what we see and how it relates to the track of life we’re on. The Classic approach is to analyze where the train is and where it’s been to figure out where to go. But in life, the train is always in motion so by strictly using the classic approach, the decisions are often not made in time.

I’ll take this explanation one step further. In my experience, people who swear by the classic approach are often the ones less certain of their course of action, because after all, they did not earn their knowledge, but gained it by assessing data collected. So they tend to rule from the back of the train, in the caboose. I know not many trains have a caboose anymore, but I like cabooses, so I’m going to use it here. Most of the meetings I’ve ever been in, at all levels take place in the caboose.

Why, because life is always a game of hot potato, and nobody wants to be holding the potato when the music stops. We all remember that game from grade school, right. You get the point. And the same holds true from even company presidents, and owners, accountants, engineers, sales people, everyone from the top down. It works this way in business and politics. Those people in the back of the train, drinking tea in luxury in the caboose, with their finger to the wind studying the contents of the train, but at the first sign of trouble, they can jump off the back, or perhaps even detach themselves from rest of the train by pulling the release lever if it is discovered that the train is headed over a cliff.

Meanwhile, at the front of the train is the romantic knowledge person, who is at the complete other end of the train. Those are the people that are most invested and the workhorses that drive the company because if they go over a cliff, they’ll be the first ones to fall. You’ll also find your visionary types up there, at the front with all the workhorses, scanning the countryside for pending trouble. They leave the analytic work to those in the back of the train to deal with the necessary hum drum of business compliance and government regulation, but to them, the real work is at the front.

It takes guts to be at the front of the train. You are essentially on a branch all by yourself, because the structure of every company is of course behind you, but they will abandon you at the first sign of trouble. And the romantic knows this, but stays in that position regardless.

Without realizing why I was doing a lot of things in my life, I ran across Pirsig’s book because it was noticed by many that since I ride motorcycles in the harsh cold of winter, and it is well known that I do many long distance trips by motorcycle, and that I was a different kind of thinker, that I would like the book. It had been out for many years after all. There were two things that came at me in discussions regarding my love of motorcycles. That I should watch the TV series by Ewan McGregor and Charlie Borman called Long Way Round, where they rode a motorcycle all the way around the world, and this book by Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Knowing both items were about long distance motorcycle riding, I wanted to complete a trip to Key West that had been on my mind for a while, so I put them off until I had done that. My decision to make my big trip to Key West came at a time when the company I had been working for had an annual inventory, and was the best time for me to get away for a weeklong trip. And since I had been working in aerospace, there are typically a lot of details that must get covered in an inventory, where just a few weeks prior, we had our annual NADCAP audit, which really slows things down. So a vacation to Key West with my wife on the back of a 1500 cc Suzuki Boulevard was just the right experience.

In sharp contrast to my daily life of rigid rules and very tight production deadlines, life on Duval Street was the polar opposite. Reputedly loose, and known for its gay population, I found it easy to not notice too much of that. Instead, I found the lack of politics on that small island ideal for total relaxation. It was to me the way humans if left to their own devices would create everything, for good and bad. On that island, there wasn’t much discussion of social hierarchy. There wasn’t much desire for status. The goal seemed to be to watch the sunset at Mallory Square, buy drinks from a street vendor, and possibly get naked on the roof top bar of Adam and Eve.

That type of thing is a bit too calm for me, but it did give me insight into the truth of the human condition because as I looked around, I saw a lot of professionals that were there for similar reasons. I’m not a big fan of intoxication, and many of the visitors I saw were, what they shared with me on that visit was a desire to travel to the end of the earth and just get away from the mainland, but still be under the umbrella of the United States, which is a great thing. More on that later.

Anyway, what that has to do with Pirsig, and this whole idea of institutionalism is that I made a point to read that book after my trip there, and was happy to find I had similar thoughts as he did when he made a motorcycle trip with his son across the northern part of the country going from Minnesota to California. I was worried that if I had read the book before I made a big trip of my own, that my own thoughts might have been corrupted somewhat instead of enhanced by a shared experience.

Long trips like that on a motorcycle have a way of putting you in touch with things, and your observations are much keener, because they have to be. There is not protection from the elements. There are no air bags in case of a crash. It’s you, and the road a few inches below your feet rolling by at 70 mph. Rocks, bugs, rain, the rays of the sun, can have devastating effects to your body, and after traveling over 1500 miles one way to get to such a place as Key West on a motorcycle, you find yourself driving down Duval street with your wife in a bathing suit pressed to your back and knowing you traveled a road till it just dropped off into the ocean. And you feel the relief of social convention drop away with each island you travel through down US 1. And when you come to the sign that says “welcome to paradise,” you get the feeling you’ve arrived truly at one of the world’s great places.

For me, and apparently for thousands of others that go to Key West for fishing, snorkeling, or just to visit the drinking establishments on Duval Street, the island is devoid of institutions as much as is possible in organized society. And that is what makes it a paradise.

And it takes stepping away from something sometimes before you can clearly see it, and I had been on a 20 year crusade against institutions without really knowing why, just that I was at the front of the train in every position I had ever held, but I had no explanation as to why some things that came easy for me, were so confusing to others, especially those that insist that analytic data is the only data worth looking at.
I had been to college myself three different times. The first time was right after high school, I did the typical enroll in classes because society says that the best way to get a decent job. I took night classes in economics while I worked full time during the day. But, the professors to me seemed out of touch, and my conclusion was that they taught because they couldn’t practice it in reality. And I really couldn’t see how those classes were going to equate to a good job. I was working at a metal stamping plant at the time, and I identified with the people on the floor more than the people in the front office. On the floor was where the battles were taking place. Out on the shop floor was where people got injured, lost fingers and sometimes worse. The front office was a place I saw little value being done, and the people went home safely every night. That life seemed boring, so why would I want a job up there? So I could make an extra $20,000 a year as a white collar worker?

My wife and I had one car at the time, so I rode a bicycle 8 miles each way to work so she could have the car during the day. And it was a mild excuse for me to bring some adventure to each day with my exposure to the elements. The rides to work by bicycle, and the danger of life on the shop floor was more appealing to me than what the college promised, so I quite after the first year. The late nights staying up and boring classes just didn’t hold much appeal.

I returned to classes a few years later when management at that same company suggested I had the kind of leadership ability they were looking for, and I’d need school to advance. I signed up for the classes, waiting in the lines at the enrolment office at the University of Cincinnati’s Raymond Walters College, and went to the first day of classes. College level English, business math, economics, that kind of stuff. I could not see how this was going to help me, or my family, so after one night, I quit again.
The third time was after several jobs. I had felt the sting of being a floor worker and holding token leadership positions, and having contracts cancelled and job reductions result. I bounced around from several different companies always finding myself in a position of a leader, by default, but not really having job security. I had a couple of kids, and since my wife and I agreed to have her stay home to be available at all times to raise our children, I worked several odd jobs to make supplement income. Some of those odd jobs included grill cooks at McDonalds, and Wendy’s, I did various sales work, I did janitorial work, and I worked as a tree trimmer.

The tree trimming was dangerous work and I liked it most of the time. But it was hard to work all day at a normal punch the time clock type job and have the gumption to climb a tree at the end of the day and remove it piece by piece hanging from a rope. So I lobbied to switch to third shift at my machine rebuilding job at Cincinnati Milacron, which was a pretty good job at the time, and went back to school full time during the day so I could go for a white collar position either at Milacron, or someplace else.
In a couple of weeks of classes, I couldn’t help but see the blank looks on all the students, many were my age, some were coming back to school to get a better job, some were just kids out of high school, doing the college thing because they wanted a good job. But the overall atmosphere was one of decay, and stagnation. The professors had not changed, and why should I expect them to. And I had not changed in the direction needed to complete school. I still had too many questions for the authority in charge, and they could not give me the answers I needed.

Only books could do that, and I read extensively over the years. One powerful quote that came to me from some of Joseph Campbell’s works was that often the reason many stories involve a hero having to leave society in order to find a way to save it is because society is the one in trouble, so they are not equipped to give the hero what he needs. So the answers are often outside the establishment.
So I quite school for the third and last time. And I looked outside society to find answers to some of the problems within it. And that led to many adventures that we will discuss as the chapters progress. But for now, Key West, outside of society in a way, Pirsig’s thoughts on romantic knowledge, which certainly defines my approach and my own long motorcycle trips.

I have had great success in management positions over the years. It has been a routine for me to take over positions from other managers and quickly fix the problems they had been having. What I never did do was look at the fish bones and other charts from the previous managers. I created my own fresh perspective. This of course is not what’s taught. Teamwork and collaboration are the cornerstones of modern business, so says Bill Smith of Motorola and pioneer of its Six Sigma applications in 1986. He died of a heart attack in 1993 at work but not before seeing Motorola receive the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. GE and Honeywell were two of the first to jump on the Six Sigma bandwagon and used it as a way to find savings they should have always seen, but for the fact that they are huge companies that had huge waste, undetected while they strolled the golf courses of America. Nothing against Mr. Smith, hindsight is 20/20, and he was only trying to get his bosses to listen to reason from pioneers such as Genichi Taguchi who helped Japan reclaim itself after World War II. As it’s turned out though, like many things, good intentions pave the way to hell. Of the 58 large companies that took Six Sigma as a method 91% have trailed the S&P 500 since making that decision. The invisible villain to Six Sigma is it stifles creativity, and ingenuity, and prohibits growth. It saves money by cutting logical waste, but puts everyone in the back of the train leaving nobody up front to make decisions. That is why it is an unmitigated failure to American society.

As you read this, look around at your peers in business and politics. Look at the course of life they are on, and see if they aren’t in for a similar fate as Bill Smith. Organizations such as Six Sigma have gone to great strides, unintentionally, to bring about our lack of competitive advantage currently. And they have worked their way into every aspect of society.

And colleges, like all institutions, have swelled in this later half century because they offer the same thing large companies like GE have bought in to with Six Sigma; a savings of money, and ease of effort, to maximize some proportional return on the investment. But what ends up happening, is a loss of future development while you may show slight profit on paper.

That’s why the answers were always along the road less traveled. While I was on my motorcycle trip in Key West I had to look around at the people packed into Sloppy Joes to listen to a half decent band play while drinking profusely. And I had for them a new understanding to explain their behavior. Escape.

Escape from the world and all its childish institutions. For me, it was a long standing answer to the question I had, why is drinking so prominent in our culture. Adults from 1947 to current that routinely drink alcohol hovers around 64%, and my question has always been why? What makes anyone want to consume a beverage that dehydrates your body, and can make you feel terrible the next day? It is a learned behavior and natural byproduct of going against our natures where we all feel is progressing along without our help or input. So the alcohol provides some needed numbness barrier against that sense of impending doom. And this is a steady and predictable reaction to the slow, eroding conditions institutions place upon our society. College age kids are learning this wherever they are going to school. Every campus has this culture as a natural counter to the mundane diatribe of the college professors.

And for working adults that have to either put up with some company line where the heads of companies force a Six Sigma program on their company whether it’s at the front office level, or the manufacturing floor, it impacts everyone within the organization. For every dollar gained from saved waste, there is always the loss of potential income gained through ingenuity. And everyone at some level feels it, even if they can’t articulate it. And those leaders in those companies typically are at the back of the train looking at powerful companies like GE and they see the report that GE saved 12 billion over a 5 year period and added 1 dollar to their market share, and they allow that information to steer their decision to commit to a program that basically goes against American ingenuity, which is something we have as Americans innate, because we all grew up in a free society. So powerless to stop the avalanche, we turn to the drink, or turn to religion, and many times both.

Six Sigma is not an American idea. It is a concept started in Japan, that Mr. Smith put some new names to, and added a few processes to in order to make a claim to invention. And I’m picking on Six Sigma because it is one of many institutions that are in place in modern business that is prohibitive to what America is naturally good at. And it’s so popular now, that it has name recognition even if the company you do work for isn’t using it.

I’ve personally had to sit through hours of classes in my positions studying this concept and feeling sorry for the instructors, and the owners of the companies I’ve worked for because they are just like fish that bit the hook of a fisherman, with a line in the water. In this case, the Japanese, have a book, actually a couple of books, one is called The Art of War, and the other is The Book of Five Rings which explains in great detail what they are doing to us, and both books will be talked about in further chapters. But in post World War II, we had just bombed their small island with nuclear bombs after a very bitter conflict, and we thought they were just going to go away and be our friends? No, they gave us Six Sigma, a slow poison of which they have immunity to.

The reason they are immune to the effects is because they are not like us. We’re all people with two arms, two legs, a head, hands and feet, and I certainly don’t mean they are inferior, or superior, only how they think is different than us. They are very good at group organizing and incorporating the analytic process. They will work around the clock and not ask for much in return. They live in much smaller living space than the average American, and will often stay with their parents even after they marry. They in many ways understand us more than we understand ourselves. And they knew they could out manufacture us, and what they’ve done as an international business strategy, was to get the world to follow them.

But we can’t be like them without fundamentally changing ourselves and they know that. And to properly do their Six Sigma program, you have to think like a person from the East.

Americans do not like to work together though. We’ll go to the grocery and pass two feet from someone, and not make eye contact with another person. We are one of the few places on earth where we grew up in space, and we like our elbow room. We do not feel compelled to acknowledge another person even if they bump into us. And while the world, that has been jealous of the space we have, points its finger and tells us we are wrong, and we should change, it is probably time that we put some sort of definition on what an American is.

An American isn’t a white homosapien, a Native American, an African-American, a Hispanic American, and Asian American or any of those titles. We are a people that love space, liberties around the clock, and we are a very individualistic group. And we’ve wasted a tremendous amount of time being defensive about that from Europe, and Asia where individualism is not near as important to them because it has not been an option in thousands of years of social development. And it’s time we focus on what we are good at and stop trying to copy everyone else. If you want evidence of this, look at the football played by the rest of the world, and look at the football we play. Our football is a uniquely American idea, and most of the star players are not decedents from Europe. But the concept is all American. The other things to study are who made the last blockbuster film from Tokyo, or Paris? How about London? They all make films, but the films produced are often reflective, by default, of the cultures that produce them. You want to know about a culture, study their art. And studying American art is easy, go to your local video store. Our films are the envy of the world because American culture has so much to say, because we actually think and naturally question authority.

So let’s get back to a guy like Walt Disney, who never went to college. He dropped out of high school at age 16 even, and never came close to entering college. Books by themselves could and have been written about Disney. But the short of it is this, who has been able to replace Disney as a media empire? What foreign company has come close to equally Walt Disney? Don’t you think they would if they could? George Lucas is the closest that comes to my mind, and he uses Disney’s model. And before you say Disney as a company has made more money since the theme parks opened in the 70’s than it did while he was alive, it was that they stayed true to his vision and did not stray. So they’ve kept the quality of his work intact.

After Walt Disney died, the animation division faltered and was not resurrected until the 90’s with when Jeffery Katzenberg took over the animation division. Most of Disney’s modern era animation films, which they are known for, came while Katzenberg was at Disney. Once he and Michael Eisner had a power struggle where Eisner failed to promote Katzenberg to president of the company, Eisner left to found DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg. And before you say that Pixar, a Disney company that still makes great animated films, which was started by George Lucas and bought by Disney, they didn’t develop that on their own.

However, not since Jeffery Katzenberg left Disney’s animation division has Disney been able to recapture the magic, and they are still waiting for that special guy to come and help them make great animated musicals again. The reasons I bring all this up is because consider the power the Disney Corporation has. Consider the reach they have. Think of all the top students at all the universities all across the country that wish to work for Disney. And they have vast resources to develop with, yet why is it so difficult to put out a film like The Little Mermaid again? Because people like Katzenberg, Walt Disney, George Lucas, and those types of people, cannot be duplicated in an institution. No matter how hard they try, no class anywhere can create people who produce at that high level.

If the intention were to teach students to be thinkers at a high level, it would be a different story, and one that I could see would be something of value. But the intention is only to produce some mediocre specimen in a social context. None of my experience at college or even grade school has shown me there is any quest in the student body to find the exceptional among us, except in sports.

There’s nothing wrong if you did go out and pursued a degree, and spent a great deal of money on it. But the degree will not make you the next Walt Disney or Henry Ford, just so long as everyone understands that.

While it’s true that things were different back in the early days of the industrial revolution, and very few people pursued a formal education then, the same rules apply in the modern era. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard. He did find some friends there that helped him work out his thoughts, but what at Harvard was some professor going to do for someone as forward thinking as Gates? He set up a deal with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems(MITS), after reading a popular science article and told them he and his friends had been working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform. In truth, they had not, but they figured it out in time for a meeting with the MITS president a few weeks later. One thing led to another and pretty soon Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft within a few months.

Steven Spielberg snuck onto the lot of Universal Studios and set up an office and pretended to be important and just sort of hung around as an unpaid intern. He applied three times to USC’s School of Theater but was turned down because of his C average. So he enrolled at California State University at Longbeach. But it was his sneaking onto the lot of Universal that got his career moving. 35 years later, Spielberg did get a degree at USC; I suppose to prove a point, that after he made some of the most successful movies of all time.

What colleges have done is firmly imbed themselves into politics. It is now an expected part of our culture. Parents begin saving for their children’s college before their kids even enter kindergarten. And it is an unfashionable taboo to question the institutional process even though much of the liberal oriented political viewpoints are imposed by professors upon the students at universities. Not necessarily a harmful thing directly, but does become a force to contend with at election time when millions of college age students go to vote. The institution then becomes a political weapon.

No matter what you’re political persuasion is, having an entire age group think in one political manner does not accurately reflect the values of the society at large. As it currently is, higher education is a powerful mechanism for the DNC, and for that type of vote buying power, they should be paying us for the influence they have over our kids. Not us paying them.

Not all students buy into the liberal positions of colleges, and of course not all professors are liberal hippies. But overwhelmingly, the young people between 18 and 22 are likely to believe in gun control, social reforms, and minority rights, as important voting issues in an election. And that makes the institution not just something that will get them a professional position at some company.

Woodrow Wilson went from being president of Princeton University, to governor of New Jersey, then soon after, President of the United States. He is responsible for the League of Nations which paved the way for the United Nations. And while he worked with England and France to divide up the post World War 1 Europe through the Treaty of Versailles. During this wonderful divide, the Middle East was created which led to most of the current troubles in the region today. Iraq was formed due to the Treaty. Germany was forced to pay the reparations of the war completely, which bankrupted them and gave Hitler a platform to rise, and a young Vietnamese bus boy at the Ritz in Paris called Ho Chi Minh begged for a chance to plead for Vietnam’s independence to Wilson, who was ignored because Vietnam was not near the issues of Europe. At that time, Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist, and a fan of the American Revolution. He wanted the same for his county, but when the League of Nations wouldn’t listen he turned to the communists in the Soviet Union which eventually led to the Vietnam War, more on that later. So with all the great intentions Wilson had in forming a massive League of Nations, that stood on the high ground of morality and international good will, he really screwed up. In historical context ninety years isn’t very long, but it exceeds our short memories as Americans. It is difficult to look that far back and see how decisions made then impact now. But they sure did. The Treaty of Versailles caused World War II, The Vietnam War, and the Gulf War, both of them. And that is the model of the current United Nations. With all the current activity going on at the old Palace of Nations in Geneva we can only guess at the many plots boiling there that will impact us twenty, thirty years down the road. But that’s just me talking from the front of the train. All you in the back enjoy the ride.

Wilson is a hero to the progressive movement, and the modern democrats as well as colleges across the country because he was in essence an intellectual, like them, so he is widely followed. But looking at the Treaty of Versailles, even though the intentions were good, turned out to be absolutely devastating to the American way of life.
Institutions whether you’re talking about a typical college, or something like Six Sigma are not American ideas. They are foreign ideas, and should be available under the umbrella of freedom. But of the founding fathers, which Jefferson graduated from the college of William and Mary, Madison from Princeton, and Adams from Harvard, George Washington did not go to any college, and he was the first president, and that says a lot about our character. It wasn’t just the bravery he exhibited, but there was a sense of logic to whatever Washington did. But he wasn’t the only found father that did not attend college. Ben Franklin was never schooled beyond age 10. Come to think of it, Abraham Lincoln never attended a university. He passed the bar exam by reading books on his own, sometimes walking over 12 miles to borrow a book as a kid.
Here’s the bottom line. Using a European model for colleges, and an Asian model for programs like Six Sigma, institutions have within a 200 year span of time, and most rapidly since the industrial revolution, taken over much of what we do and how we do it in America. And it has been a slow poison that has robbed us of our vigor. In our freedom from the shackles the rest of the world has been burdened with whether it is feudal families of Asia, or kingdoms of Europe, we developed truly original ideas that has greatly improved the livelihood of most of earth. And we have been raised with massive corn fields, and farms, and shopping malls, and free press for all of our adult lives. But to us all, the institutions feel wrong, and we know it on an innate level, but feel powerless to question the process because we all need jobs to fuel our personal economies. So when our business leaders, lazily copy off each other, because that’s human nature, and listen without thought to Jack Welch spew on about Six Sigma and how much money they saved, a careful investigator would ask, Jack, why did you need the Japanese to tell you how to create a product with little waste and deliver it on time to a customer? What he really meant to say, but couldn’t is that GE is a huge union company and he needed some program like Six Sigma that is too complicated for union stewards to understand, to sell the idea of actually applying common sense to everyday business practices. But what he did, like the blundering escapade of the Treaty of Versailles is creating more institutional limits to the American Imagination, good intentions gone badly.

So powerless to take in the whole picture, we watch our football games and drink our beer. We talk about going out at night and getting hammered and root for the players on a football field where the rules are simple. Get a first down, score a touchdown.
And that is the real cost of this institutionalized society we’re currently in. At a personal level, we feel it, but in most cases we’re willing to trade a decent wage for some loss of personal input. But on a national level, we’re allowing influences from the outside to define our national identity. When the reality is that no place else in the world has the ingenuity that has come from the United States been shown, why would we be so willing to listen to inferior strategies?

Being a great leader, manager, politician, or even an artist requires vision, and that is something institutions cannot give you. They can help you set goals, and figure out how to get the analytic data. But they cannot give you the vision to see what is coming. Only those that are willing, and bold enough to put themselves out on the cutting edge, and not hide in the safety of the masses, will have the ability to make their vision a reality.

Rich Hoffman
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Ross Perot Then, Now and Forever

The talk going on today with people like Glenn Beck and others are not new. I remember being in Dallas, Texas the day before the election in 1992. Ross Perot’s oldest daughter and her husband gave me a neck tie that I wish I still had while in the parking lot of the Perot Headquarters. I thought then Ross Perot was doing some good work, and I did everything I could to help him back then. I’m not new to all this small government stuff.

For the fun of it, I decided to go back and dig through some of his old videos. In hind sight, how right he was. People should have listened.

And he is still at it. Too bad most people want to take the blue pill.

Rich Hoffman

http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

We Are At WAR!

You won’t see tanks driving down your street. You won’t see troops knocking on your door. But you will see your way of life being destroyed in a way that is no different than a military unit cutting off a railroad or other major supply line to a strong opponent. Philosophically, economically, ethically, we are at war.

Another one of my favorite books, which is a book I studied carefully over a period of years because it’s one thing to read the book word for word and gain a basic understanding. But the work of Sun Tzu requires an understanding of eastern philosophy, which is something specifically unique to Japan and China. The following quote is from The Art of War under PLANNING A SIEGE.

Complete victory is when the army does not fight, the city is not besieged, the destruction does not go on long, but in each case the enemy is overcome by strategy. So the rule for use of the military is that if you outnumber the opponent ten to one, then surround them; five to one, attack; two to one, divide. If you are equal, then fight if you are able. If you are fewer, then keep away if you are able. If you are not as good, then flee if you are able. This advice applies to the case where all else is equal. If your forces are orderly while theirs are chaotic, if you are excited and they are sluggish, then even if they are more numerous you can do battle. If your soldiers, strength, strategy, and courage are all less than that of the opponent, then you should retreat and watch for an opening. Therefore if the smaller side is stubborn, it becomes the captive of the larger side.

There are five ways of knowing who will win. Those who know when to fight ad when not to fight are victorious. Those who discern when to use many or few troops are victorious. Those whose upper and lower ranks have the same desire are victorious. Those whose generals are able and are not constrained by their governments are victorious. These five are the ways to know who will win.

This section is under FORMATION:

To perceive victory when it is known to all is not really skillful. Everyone calls victory in battle good, but it is not really good. Everyone says victory in battle is good, but if you see the subtle and notice the hidden so as to seize victory where there is no form, this is really good. It does not take much strength to lift a hair, it does not take sharp eyes to see the sun and moon, it does not take sharp ears to hear a thunderclap. What everyone knows is not called wisdom. Victory over others by forced battle is not considered good. In ancient times those known as good warriors prevailed when it was easy to prevail. If you are only able to ensure victory after engaging an opponent in armed conflict, that victory is a hard one. If you see the subtle and notice the hidden, breaking through before formation, that victory is an easy one. Therefore the victories of good warriors are not noted for cleverness or bravery. Therefore their victories in battle are not flukes. Their victories are not flukes because they position themselves where they will surely win, prevailing over those who have already lost.

Great wisdom is not obvious, great merit is not advertised. When you see the subtle it is easy to win—what has it to do with bravery or cleverness? When trouble is solved before it forms who call that clever? When there is victory without battle, who talks about bravery?

For those who will say that I am over exaggerating or that I am seeing what I want to see in the matter, you are part of the problem. The information is in books. Sun Tzu to the Chinese is probably revered more highly than George Washington is to the United States. Chairman Mao used The Art of War to defeat Chiang Kai-shek. I was a big fan of Kai-shek. My favorite modern military figure is Claire Lee Chennault leader of the Flying Tigers. Chennault worked closely with Kai-shek to hold off communism in China, but weak US policy after World War II lead to Mao taking over the country in 1949. Chennault warned of the possibility of future war with China in his WONDERFUL book Way of the Fighter published in 1949. In that book, that is now considered a rare book, Chennault predicted the trouble with Korea and Vietnam years before they occurred. It was a shame that nobody listened then.

Starting on page 505 of Joseph Campbell’s masterpiece called Oriental Mythology, published in 1962 and was part of four books he spent 12 years writing; he chronicles the beginning of communism in China quite startlingly. While China was showing propaganda pictures to the world such as a family sitting at the table under a picture of Mao, the following events occurred. Keep in mind this is just one account of many.

A man, aged twenty-two from Doi-Dura in th Amdo region was told by the Chinese that he required treatment to make him more intelligent. The Chinese at the time were telling Tibetans that they were a stupid inferior race and would have to be sup-planted by Russians and Chinese. They took blood tests of this man, his wife, and many others, and there are a number of corresponding reports from different parts of Tibet detailing the sort of operation to which this young man and his wife were the next day forced to submit. They were both taken to the hospital. “He was completely undressed, placed on a chair and his genital organs were examined. Then a digital rectal examination was carried out and the finger was agitated. He then ejaculated a whitish fluid and one or more drops fell on a glass slide which was taken away. After this a long pointed instrument with handles like those of scissors was inserted inside the urethra and he fainted with pain. When he came round the doctors gave him a white tablet which they said would give him strength. Then he received an injection at the base of the penis where it joins the scrotum. The needle itself hurt but the injection did not. He felt momentarily numb in the region until the needle was removed. He stayed ten days in the hospital and then a month in be at home….he had been married for only two years and prior to this treatment had very strong sexual feelings…Afterwards he had no sexual desire at all….”

Meanwhile, his wife “was undressed and tied down. Her legs were raised and outstretched. Something very odd which became painful was inserted inside the vagina. She saw a kind of rubber balloon with a rubber tube attached, the end of which was inserted inside the vagina. The balloon was squeezed and his wife felt something very cold inside her. This caused no pain and only the tube and not the balloon was inserted. She remained conscious throughout. Then she was taken to bed. The same procedure was carried on every day for about a week. Then she went home and stayed in bed for about three weeks,” and thereafter she had neither sexual feeling nor menstruation.

There will always be the types of individuals on this planet that seek to control others. And with the United States having the most advanced war weapons on the face of the planet, enemies of the United States will not attack us directly, because they can’t. But they will undermine us from within. They will use propaganda to divide our nation. They will use our movie stars to perpetuate their message. They will seek to wreck our economy, our life style. They will seek to get our politicians moving in a direction that is not of the people’s wishes. And they will be patient and strike when they are sure to win.
Don’t kid yourself. We are at war right now.

And if you don’t watch any of the above, watch this one.

This is extremely serious. Pay attention and understand what’s happening. That’s the first step to turning this around.
Nothing is impossible. For inspiration I look to our AMERICAN games. If we get our minds in the game, this could be our a nation instead of just a game from my favorite sports team. I look to this game as a metaphor that nothing is ever lost until the clock runs out of time. Here is Matt Bryant’s 62 yard field goal against the Eagles in the final seconds of the game. In theory, a kick from mid-field should be impossible.

Here is the view from the stands, under the Pirate ship, where I like to sit.

And the box seats.

And leaving the stadium after the big kick.

America needs a victory like this. We need to get our currency strong again, and to regain our strength on the world stage. It’s not too late.

Rich Hoffman

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